A model driven engineering approach for business continuity management in e-Health systems

Nowadays e-Health systems recognize the benefits of new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the delivery of healthcare services. While these modern technologies have enhanced practices in the healthcare sector, the potential of failures to interrupt a process is still important. This risk of system downtime may induce significant impacts on patient safety. Thus, ensuring business resilience has proven to be increasingly challenging as the healthcare field employs more ICT applications and all signs for the future point to even more reliance on digital data. In this context, we propose an approach based on Business Continuity Management (BCM) to ensure the ability to operate in spite of unforeseen events and to quickly recover from any type of business interruption. The basic purpose of this paper is to define a formal description of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), following an approach grounded in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE).