Basic PROforma Concepts: Task types
Process-descriptions model processes as sets of interacting tasks.
Tasks represent activities that are performed by external agents (for instance patients or clinicians) who participate in the enactment of the process, as well as activities performed by the Tallis engine itself without any intervention from external agents.
The first stage in creating a process-description is to develop a model of expertise by setting out a collection of tasks that are required in order to achieve a goal.
Once the tasks have been composed into a desired network, the details of each task can be filled in.
The 5 types of Tallis tasks
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Enquiry | Represents activities that acquire information. Example What is the patient’s ethnicity? (Caucasian, Ashkenazi, Other) |
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Decision | Represents activities in which a choice is made between several different options. Example Familial genetic risk assessment:
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Action | Represents simple activities that effect some change to the external world. Example Reassure and discharge patient. |
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Plan | A task container - represents “compound” activities that are defined as a set of tasks. |
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Keystone | A placeholder task that can later be modified into any of the above. Note: By “later”, we typically mean later in the authoring process, i.e. after the overall process structure has been defined, However, in future releases of Tallis we hope to also support dynamic invocation of process-descriptions, so in this context “later” could imply deferring the definition until runtime (enactment). |