Summary
Objectives:
Adequate instruments are needed to reflect the complexity of routine cancer registry
operations properly in a business model. The activity diagram is a key instrument
of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for the modeling of business processes. The
authors aim to improve descriptions of processes in cancer registration, as well as
in other public health domains, through the enhancements of an activity diagram notation
within the standard semantics of UML.
Methods:
The authors introduced the practical approach to enhance a conventional UML activity
diagram, complementing it with the following business process concepts: timeline,
duration for individual activities, responsibilities for individual activities within
swimlanes, and descriptive text.
Results:
The authors used an enhanced activity diagram for modeling surveillance processes
in the cancer registration domain. Specific example illustrates the use of an enhanced
activity diagram to visualize a process of linking cancer registry records with external
mortality files.
Conclusions:
Enhanced activity diagram allows for the addition of more business concepts to a
single diagram and can improve descriptions of processes in cancer registration, as
well as in other domains. Additional features of an enhanced activity diagram allow
to advance the visualization of cancer registration processes. That, in turn, promotes
the clarification of issues related to the process timeline, responsibilities for
particular operations, and collaborations among process participants. Our first experiences
in a cancer registry best practices development workshop setting support the usefulness
of such an approach.
Keywords
Public health informatics - organizational models - unified modeling language (UML)
- population surveillance - cancer
