Application of Unified Modeling Language in Health Care Systems: A Systematic Review

Health care systems are known as complex systems, which are difficult to analyze and reengineer. Health system engineers often rely on Unified Modeling Language (UML) to model and simulate various parts of these systems. The purpose of the current study was to identify the most widely used and least-practicable UML diagrams as well as the range of applications of this language in the field of health care for documenting, analyzing, and designing an efficient system. The study was a systematize review. All the articles related to UML applications in the field of health care were extracted from March 2010 to July 2017 using valid keywords from the Web of Science, PubMed, ProQuest, and Elsevier Scopus databases. After screening, 48 articles were selected and analyzed via two 12-hours concurrent sessions. Three diagrams of class, activity, and use case were the most usable UML diagrams, and four diagrams of component, collaboration, object, and profile were the least used diagrams in designing and modeling in various fields of health care, respectively. In addition, in the domain of applications, infrastructure group, disease management, and knowledge discovery had the highest use of UML, respectively. Considering the fact that UML applications scopes over all aspects of the system in three areas of disease management, knowledge discovery, and health care infrastructure both in software and hardware systems, designing and modeling this application domain with UML will facilitate the reengineering and promotion of organizations, and develop interactive systems to support the linkages between different parts of the health care system and collaboration between project partners