IMPROVING KNOWLEDGE-INTENSIVE HEALTH CARE PROCESSES BEYOND EFFICIENCY

Health care has been one of the most important domains for Business Process Management (BPM) research and practice for many years. Through an exploratory case study conducted in a real organization, here named “SpecialClinic”, this research aims to investigate what lies beyond “traditional” BPM, in particular process efficiency, as practiced by many organizations today. It focuses on customer-facing knowledge-intensive BPs in the case organization and aims to investigate their ongoing improvement. The main findings of this research challenge the main objectives of BP improvement (i.e. reduced costs, improved efficiency) as they show that some organizations are making their “to-be” processes slower and more expensive, yet significantly improved in terms of quality of patient care. In addition to its main research contribution related to new approaches to improvement of knowledge-intensive BPs, this work offers some important lessons for the BPM practitioners interested in expanding the current boundaries of BPM

Flexible Support of Healthcare Processes

Traditionally, healthcare information systems have focused on the support of predictable and repetitive clinical processes. Even though the latter can be often prespecified in formal process models, process flexibility in terms of dynamic adaptability is indispensable to cope with exceptions and unforeseen situations. Flexibility is further required to accommodate the need for evolving healthcare processes and to properly support healthcare process variability. In addition, process-aware information systems are increasingly used to support less structured healthcare processes (i.e., patient treatment processes), which can be characterized as knowledge-intensive. Healthcare processes of this category are neither fully predictable nor repetitive and, therefore, they cannot be fully prespecified at design time. The partial unpredictability of these processes, in turn, demands a certain amount of looseness. This chapter deals with the characteristic flexibility needs of both prespecified and loosely specified healthcare processes. In addition, it presents fundamental flexibility features required to address these flexibility needs as well as to accommodate them in healthcare practice

Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

Towards using BPM Patterns in Requirements Elicitation

In an increasingly changing environment, different organizations are trying to improve their agility and efficiency by improving their business processes; thus, business process management has been gaining momentum for the last decade. The first step in business process management is the modeling of business processes. Business Process Modeling (BPM), in itself, is very important because it captures business requirements, allows for better understanding of a business and its processes, facilitates communication between business analysts and IT people, and pinpoints deficiencies in processes. It also serves as a basis for automation of these processes. But business process modeling comes with its own challenges since it is a time-consuming, complicated, and error-prone task. As a result, producing a high quality, precise business process model is not easy. BPM patterns, which are general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in business process modeling, have been proposed to address these challenges. In this research, we conducted an exploratory study about requirements engineering practices in a large organization. This study identified key challenges in requirements engineering and showed how business process modeling is currently being conducted. Then, we created a survey of the different BPM pattern catalogs existing in the literature. Finally, we presented one of the BPM pattern catalogs in a clear format along with examples of each pattern. The ultimate objective is to allow business analysts to effectively use BPM patterns while creating precise BP models.1 yea

Von ADEPT zur AristaFlow BPM Suite - Eine Vision wird Realität: "Correctness by Construction" und flexible, robuste Ausführung von Unternehmensprozessen

Angeregt durch ein Forschungsprojekt im Bereich klinischer Informationssysteme, wurde von uns Mitte der 90er Jahre das Forschungsprojekt ADEPT gestartet, welches im Bereich Prozess-Management das nahezu Unmögliche anstrebte und mittlerweile auch erreicht hat: Hochgradig flexible Ausführung von Unternehmensprozessen, Realisierung robuster prozessorientierter Anwendungen "per Konstruktion" sowie ein für alle Anwendergruppen (Prozess-Implementierer, Systemadministratoren, Endbenutzer) einfach zu benutzendes System. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt die Hintergründe des ADEPT-Projekts sowie unsere Motivation für die gesteckten Ziele, die von uns verfolgte Vision und deren vollständige Umsetzung in der nunmehr verfügbaren AristaFlow® BPM Suite

An extended configurable UML activity diagram and a transformation algorithm for business process reference modeling

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions provide generic off-the-shelf reference models usually known as best practices . The configuration !individualization of the reference model to meet specific requirements of business end users however, is a difficult task. The available modeling languages do not provide a complete configurable language that could be used to model configurable reference models. More specifically, there is no algorithm that monitors the transformation of configurable UML Activity Diagram (AD) models while preserving the syntactic correctness of the model. To fill these gaps we propose an extended UML AD modeling language which we named Configurable UML Activity Diagram (C-UML AD). The C-UML AD is used to represent a reference model while showing all the variation points and corresponding dependencies within the model. The C-UML AD covers the requirements and attributes of a configurable modeling language as prescribed by earlier researchers who developed Configurable EPC (C-EPC). We also propose a complete algorithm that transforms the C-UML AD business model to an individual consistent UML AD business model, where the end user\u27s configuration values are consistent with the constraints of the model. Meanwhile, the syntactic correctness of the transformed model is preserved. We validated the Transformation Algorithm by showing how all the transformation steps of the algorithm preserve the syntactic correctness of any given configurable business model, as prescribed by earlier researchers, and by running it on different sets of test scenarios to demonstrate its correctness. We developed a tool to apply the Transformation Algorithm and to demonstrate its validity on a set of test cases as well as a real case study that was used by earlier researchers who developed the C-EPC

On the degree of behavioral similarity between business process models

Quality aspects become increasingly important while business process modeling is used in a large-scale enterprise setting. In order to facilitate a storage without redundancy and an efficient retrieval of relevant process models in model databases it is required to develop a theoretical understanding of how a degree of behavioral similarity can be defined. In this paper we address this challenge in a novel way. We use causal footprints as an abstract representation of the behavior captured by a process model, since they allow us to compare models defined in both formal modeling languages like Petri nets and informal ones like EPCs. Based on the causal footprint derived from two models we calculate their similarity based on the established vector space model from information retrieval. We illustrate this concept with an example from the SAP Reference Model and present a prototypical implementation as a plug-in to the ProM framework