Modelling long-lived health care workflow transactions

Due to the increasing automation of health care, health care work ows have received signi cant attention over the last few years. This paper discusses the di erences between typical business processes and health care work ows, and introduces a layered architecture suitable for health care work ow models.We present a rules-based approach for mod- elling long-lived health care work ow transactions, and we discuss a set of transactional integrity rules speci c to the work ow patterns found in traditional business processes and show how these rules can be used to design health care work ows with transactional characteristics.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Modelling long-lived health care workflow transactions

Due to the increasing automation of health care, health care work ows have received signi cant attention over the last few years. This paper discusses the di erences between typical business processes and health care work ows, and introduces a layered architecture suitable for health care work ow models.We present a rules-based approach for mod- elling long-lived health care work ow transactions, and we discuss a set of transactional integrity rules speci c to the work ow patterns found in traditional business processes and show how these rules can be used to design health care work ows with transactional characteristics.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Global transaction support for workflow management systems: from formal specification to practical implementation

In this paper, we present an approach to global transaction management in workflow environments. The transaction mechanism is based on the well-known notion of compensation, but extended to deal with both arbitrary process structures to allow cycles in processes and safepoints to allow partial compensation of processes. We present a formal specification of the transaction model and transaction management algorithms in set and graph theory, providing clear, unambiguous transaction semantics. The specification is straightforwardly mapped to a modular architecture, the implementation of which is first applied in a testing environment, then in the prototype of a commercial workflow management system. The modular nature of the resulting system allows easy distribution using middleware technology. The path from abstract semantics specification to concrete, real-world implementation of a workflow transaction mechanism is thus covered in a complete and coherent fashion. As such, this paper provides a complete framework for the application of well-founded transactional workflows

Modelling long-lived health care workflow transactions

Due to the increasing automation of health care, health care work ows have received signi cant attention over the last few years. This paper discusses the di erences between typical business processes and health care work ows, and introduces a layered architecture suitable for health care work ow models.We present a rules-based approach for mod- elling long-lived health care work ow transactions, and we discuss a set of transactional integrity rules speci c to the work ow patterns found in traditional business processes and show how these rules can be used to design health care work ows with transactional characteristics.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

NOW: Orchestrating services in a nomadic network using a dedicated workflow language

AbstractOrchestrating services in nomadic or mobile ad hoc networks is not without a challenge, since these environments are built upon volatile connections. Services residing on mobile devices are exposed to (temporary) network failures, which must be considered the rule rather than the exception. This paper proposes a dedicated workflow language built on top of an ambient-oriented programming language that supports dynamic service discovery and communication primitives resilient to network failures. The proposed workflow language, NOW, has support for high level workflow abstractions for control flow, rich network and service failure detection, and failure handling through compensating actions, and dynamic data flow between the services in the environment. By adding this extra layer of abstraction, the application programmer is offered a flexible way to develop applications for nomadic networks

Knowledge based approach to flexible workflow management systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).Today's business environments are characterized by dynamic and uncertain environments. In order to effectively support business processes in such contexts, workflow management systems must be able to adapt themselves effectively. In this dissertation, the workflow is redefined in concept and represented with a set of business rules. Business rules play a central role in organizational workflows in context of cooperation among actors. To achieve business goals, they constrain the flow of works, use of resources, and responsibility mapping between tasks and actors using role concept. Business rules are explicitly modeled in the Knowledge-based Workflow Model (KWM) using frames. To increase the adaptability of workflow management system, KWM has several distinctive features. First, it increases expressiveness of workflow model so that exception handling rules and responsibility mapping rules between tasks and actors as well as task scheduling rules are explicitly modeled. Secondly, formal definition of KWM enables one to define and to analyze correctness of workflow schema. Knowledge-based approach enables more powerful analysis on workflow schema including checking consistency and compactness of routing rules as well as terminality of a workflow. Thirdly, providing change propagation mechanism which assures correctness of workflow after the modification of workflow schema increases adaptability. Change propagation rules for the modification primitives are provided to manage workflow evolution. On the other hand, metarules that control rules in KWM are used to handle exceptions that occur in a running workflow instance. Workflow participants can easily change workflow schema of a workflow instance with the support of extra rules and a metarule. Based on KWM, K-WFMS (Knowledge-based WorkFlow Management System) has been implemented in client/server architecture. Inference shell of knowledge-based systems is employed for enactment of business rules and integrated with database systems. From a real application based on the KWM architecture, it has been shown that system performance can increase notably by reducing the number of rules and facts that are used in the course of workflow enactment

Investigating the impact of health analytics on the cost and quality of care for patients with heart failure

The healthcare industry is under tremendous pressure to improve the quality of care and provide more patient centric care, while reducing costs. The potential use of data analytics to address these health system issues has raised significant interest in both research and practice. Health Analytics is central to informing and realizing the systematic quality improvements and cost reductions required by healthcare reform. Fundamentally, the contribution of IS and analytics research in healthcare is to identify and study the impact of interventions that can make a significant difference to the quality and cost of care. This dissertation is concentrated on patients with heart failure (HF). HF is the number one killer in the world, and is the largest contributor to healthcare costs in the United States. Moreover, HF is one of the six conditions used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to exercise fiduciary control over health systems by monitoring both the quality and cost of care. Specifically, my larger research question is “How can we identify and inform impactful transition of care interventions that manage costs and improve resource allocation efficiencies while providing improved quality of care for heart failure patients?” We adopted a mixed-method approach to study the impact of transitional care in a healthcare system for patients with heart failure. This dissertation includes three essays. In the first essay, I use qualitative methods to study the nature, sources and impacts of information coordination problems as HF patients’ transition through the patient flow in a health system. I propose a set of interventions based on my analysis of information and control errors along the continuum of care to inform the design of appropriate interventions that improve the cost and quality of care. In the second essay, I empirically evaluate the impact of these interventions on cost and quality of care measures such as all cause readmissions, heart failure readmissions, ER visits, length of stay, and cost of care. Analysis suggests that multicomponent complex transitional interventions have significant impact on reducing 30-day readmission and ER visits. The third essay is dedicated to understanding the impact of heart failure patient’s self-care behaviors. I developed and validated an assessment tool for patients with heart failure to monitor and score their condition accurately. Together, these essays investigate impactful transition of care interventions that can help healthcare organizations improve quality of care and manage costs from the clinical, administrative and patient perspectives

An Overlay Architecture for Personalized Object Access and Sharing in a Peer-to-Peer Environment

Due to its exponential growth and decentralized nature, the Internet has evolved into a chaotic repository, making it difficult for users to discover and access resources of interest to them. As a result, users have to deal with the problem of information overload. The Semantic Web's emergence provides Internet users with the ability to associate explicit, self-described semantics with resources. This ability will facilitate in turn the development of ontology-based resource discovery tools to help users retrieve information in an efficient manner. However, it is widely believed that the Semantic Web of the future will be a complex web of smaller ontologies, mostly created by various groups of web users who share a similar interest, referred to as a Community of Interest. This thesis proposes a solution to the information overload problem using a user driven framework, referred to as a Personalized Web, that allows individual users to organize themselves into Communities of Interests based on ontologies agreed upon by all community members. Within this framework, users can define and augment their personalized views of the Internet by associating specific properties and attributes to resources and defining constraint-functions and rules that govern the interpretation of the semantics associated with the resources. Such views can then be used to capture the user's interests and integrate these views into a user-defined Personalized Web. As a proof of concept, a Personalized Web architecture that employs ontology-based semantics and a structured Peer-to-Peer overlay network to provide a foundation of semantically-based resource indexing and advertising is developed. In order to investigate mechanisms that support the resource advertising and retrieval of the Personalized Web architecture, three agent-driven advertising and retrieval schemes, the Aggressive scheme, the Crawler-based scheme, and the Minimum-Cover-Rule scheme, were implemented and evaluated in both stable and churn environments. In addition to the development of a Personalized Web architecture that deals with typical web resources, this thesis used a case study to explore the potential of the Personalized Web architecture to support future web service workflow applications. The results of this investigation demonstrated that the architecture can support the automation of service discovery, negotiation, and invocation, allowing service consumers to actualize a personalized web service workflow. Further investigation will be required to improve the performance of the automation and allow it to be performed in a secure and robust manner. In order to support the next generation Internet, further exploration will be needed for the development of a Personalized Web that includes ubiquitous and pervasive resources