What BPM Technology Can Do for Healthcare Process Support

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering personalized services to their patients in a cost-effective and efficient manner. This, in turn, requires advanced IT support for healthcare processes covering both organizational procedures and knowledge-intensive, dynamic treatment processes. Nowadays, required agility is often hindered by a lack of flexibility in hospital information systems. To overcome this inflexibility a new generation of information systems, denoted as process-aware information systems (PAISs), has emerged. In contrast to data- and function-centered information systems, a PAIS separates process logic from application code and thus provides an additional architectural layer. However, the introduction of process-aware hospital information systems must neither result in rigidity nor restrict staff members in their daily work. This keynote presentation reflects on recent developments from the business process management (BPM) domain, which enable process adaptation, process flexibility, and process evolution. These key features will be illustrated along existing BPM frameworks. Altogether, emerging BPM methods, concepts and technologies will contribute to further enhance IT support for healthcare processes

Towards a Conceptual Framework Fostering Process Comprehension in Healthcare

Despite the widespread use of process models in healthcare organizations, there are many unresolved issues regarding the reading and comprehension of these models by domain experts. This is aggravated by the fact that there exists a plethora of process modeling languages for the graphical do-cumentation of processes, which are often not used consistently for various reasons. Hence, the identification of those factors fostering the comprehension of process models becomes crucial. We have developed a conceptual framework incorporating measurements and theories from cognitive neuroscience and psychology to unravel factors fostering the comprehension of process models within organizations. We believe that a better comprehension of process models will enhance the support of healthcare processes significantly

Optimized Time Management for Declarative Workflows

Declarative process models are increasingly used since they fit better with the nature of flexible process-aware information systems and the requirements of the stakeholders involved. When managing business processes, in addition, support for representing time and reasoning about it becomes crucial. Given a declarative process model, users may choose among different ways to execute it, i.e., there exist numerous possible enactment plans, each one presenting specific values for the given objective functions (e.g., overall completion time). This paper suggests a method for generating optimized enactment plans (e.g., plans minimizing overall completion time) from declarative process models with explicit temporal constraints. The latter covers a number of well-known workflow time patterns. The generated plans can be used for different purposes like providing personal schedules to users, facilitating early detection of critical situations, or predicting execution times for process activities. The proposed approach is applied to a range of test models of varying complexity. Although the optimization of process execution is a highly constrained problem, results indicate that our approach produces a satisfactory number of suitable solutions, i.e., solutions optimal in many cases

Mobile Task Management for Medical Ward Rounds - The MEDo Approach

In hospitals, ward rounds are crucial for decision-making in the context of patient treatment processes. In the course of a ward round, new tasks are defined and allocated to physicians and nurses. In clinical practice, however, these tasks are not systematically managed. During ward rounds, they are jotted down using pen and paper, and their later processing is prone to errors. Furthermore, medical staff must keep track of the processing status of its tasks (e.g., medical orders). To relieve staff members from such a manual task management, the MEDo approach supports ward rounds by transforming the pen and paper worksheet to a mobile user interface on a tablet integrating process support, mobile task management, and access to the electronic patient record. Interviews we conducted have confirmed that medical staff craves for mobile task and process support on wards. Furthermore, in several user experiments, we have proven that MEDo puts task acquisition on a level comparable to that of pen and paper. Overall, with MEDo, physicians can create, monitor and share tasks using a mobile and user-friendly platform

Towards Object-aware Process Support in Healthcare Information Systems

The processes to be supported by healthcare information systems are highly complex, and they produce and consume a large amount of data. Besides, they require a high degree of flexibility. Despite their widespread adoption in industry, however, traditional process management systems (PrMS) have not been broadly used in healthcare environments so far. One major reason for this is the missing integration of processes with business data; i.e., business objects (e.g., medical orders or reports) are usually outside the control of a PrMS. By contrast, our PHILharmonicFlows framework offers an object-aware process management approach, which tightly integrates business objects and processes. In this paper, we use this framework to support a breast cancer diagnosis scenario. We discuss the lessons learned from this case study as well as requirements from the healthcare domain that can be effectively met by an object-aware process management system

Business Process Management for optimizing clinical processes: A systematic literature review

Business Process Management is a new strategy for process management that is having a major impact today. Mainly, its use is focused on the industrial, services, and business sector. However, in recent years, it has begun to apply for optimizing clinical processes. So far, no studies that evaluate its true impact on the healthcare sector have been found. This systematic review aims to assess the results of the application of Business Process Management methodology on clinical processes, analyzing whether it can become a useful tool to improve the effectiveness and quality of processes. We conducted a systematic literature review using ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and Springer databases. After the electronic search process in different databases, 18 articles met the pre-established requirements. The findings support the use of Business Process Management as an effective methodology to optimize clinical processes. Business Process Management has proven to be a feasible and useful methodology to design and optimize clinical processes, as well as to automate tasks. However, a more comprehensive follow-up of this methodology, better technological support, and greater involvement of all the clinical staff are factors that play a key role for the development of its true potential.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (ref. TIN2014-53067-C3-1-R) and co-financed by FEDER

Enabling Flexible and Robust Business Process Automation for the Agile Enterprise

During the last decade process-aware information systems (PAISs) have become increasingly popular to digitize business processes and to effectively support them at the operational level. In many application domains, however, PAISs will not be accepted by users if rigidity comes with them. Ensuring PAIS robustness, in turn, becomes extremely complicated if high flexibility demands need to be fulfilled. To cope with the dynamic nature of business processes, we developed AristaFlow, a next generation process management technology that enables comprehensive process lifecycle support. In addition to standard process management services, AristaFlow can handle exceptions, change the execution of running business cases on the fly, efficiently deal with uncertainty, and support the evolution of business processes over time. This paper discusses how AristaFlow assists the various stakeholders of a PAIS to cope with errors and exceptional situations, while still meeting robustness needs. In particular, we focus on new error handling procedures and capabilities utilizing the flexibility provided by ad-hoc changes

Conceptualising BPM Practice For Improved Patient Flow In Emergency Units Of South African Hospitals

Global healthcare systems are strained with higher patient loads due to longer life expectancy and higher disease burden. Due to extended services hours and easier access, South African indigent pa-tients with no medical insurance, rely on Emergency Care Centres for all-encompassing medical ser-vices. Integrated clinical processes require crucial resources, such as hospital beds, for an even flow of patients throughout hospitals. However, overcrowding deadlocks enabling assets, which constrains care delivery. Escalating waiting times and inefficient healthcare detracts from patient health. Strained economies necessitate sustainable, cost-effective reform. This research informs more efficient patient flow practice in Emergency Centres (ECs), by way of Health Information Systems (HIS) theo-ry. By adopting a pragmatic, inductive stance, a practical improvement output drew from the holistic, integrated management facet of Business Process Management (BPM). Case studies yielding compa-rable data occurred at three hospitals, two public and one private. Systematic use of BPM theories allowed the qualitative assessment of as-is process activity at patient touch-points, which supports the prescriptive conclusions. The data contextualised the disparity arising from better funded healthcare. By correlating current improvement efforts with BPM theory, this paper argues for IS-optimised busi-ness operations in clinical settings. Thus, presenting target business-areas to feasibly transform healthcare