Formal reliability analysis of a typical FHIR standard based e-Health system using PRISM

Abstract

Fast Health Interoperable Resources (FHIR) is the recently proposed standard from HL7. Its distinguishing features include the user friendly implementation, support of built-in terminologies and for widely-used web standards. Given the safety-critical nature of FHIR, the rigorous analysis of e-health systems using the FHIR is a dire need since they are prone to failures. As a first step towards this direction, we propose to use probabilistic model checking, i.e., a formal probabilistic analysis approach, to assess the reliability of a typical e-health system used in hospitals based on the FHIR standard. In particular, we use the PRISM model checker to analyze the Markov Decision Process (MDP) and Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) models to assess the failure probabilities of the overall system.