ABSTRACT
Clinicians are used to working with models, although they rarely use the term explicitly. The models that clinicians are most familiar with are those of disease processes, which are built up from immunological, microbiological and pathological observations about the disease. There are a wide variety of modelling techniques in use, but some enterprise business modellers have found it useful to use a broad category of techniques created by the systems analysis profession. In the 1980s a new flavour of analysis techniques emerged, which were more accessible to business users and more pertinent to enterprise modelling; these are the object-oriented analysis techniques. The clinical process model, which uses object-oriented methodology, provides a model of the process of health care in object-oriented terms. While black boxes can be used in isolation, they are destined to become increasingly incorporated into clinical guidelines.
