Introduction to BPM approach in Healthcare and Case Study of End User Interaction with EHR Interface

Nowadays, process management is a key factor in the success of organizations. The market in which the organizations operate is increasingly competitive. This increase makes the improvement of business processes a constant and essential need in organizations. In recent years, organizations increasingly choose to adopt Business Process Management (BPM) and try to use the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to model their processes and, as a result, to make their systems and applications more interoperable with others. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is another system for the exploitation of clinical and administrative information. Much of the information is generated in the EHR itself, the rest of the information results from external systems and are loaded into the EHR support database. This technology is a system with encrypted clinical information used in hospitals. This article looks at what BPMN is, and how BPMN can be a solution for an EHR. As a result, BPMN workflow diagrams of the system processes of the study case organization were created. The platform used in the case study is the Agency for Integration, Archive and Diffusion of Medical Information (AIDA) platform. Four main modules of the EHR were modeled; one of the modules was the ambulatory module.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013

Integrated engineering environments for large complex products

An introduction is given to the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, along with a brief explanation of the main focus towards large made-to-order products. Three key areas of research at the Centre, which have evolved as a result of collaboration with industrial partners from various sectors of industry, are identified as (1) decision support and optimisation, (2) design for lifecycle, and (3) design integration and co-ordination. A summary of the unique features of large made-to-order products is then presented, which includes the need for integration and co-ordination technologies. Thus, an overview of the existing integration and co-ordination technologies is presented followed by a brief explanation of research in these areas at the Engineering Design Centre. A more detailed description is then presented regarding the co-ordination aspect of research being conducted at the Engineering Design Centre, in collaboration with the CAD Centre at the University of Strathclyde. Concurrent Engineering is acknowledged as a strategy for improving the design process, however design coordination is viewed as a principal requirement for its successful implementation. That is, design co-ordination is proposed as being the key to a mechanism that is able to maximise and realise any potential opportunity of concurrency. Thus, an agentoriented approach to co-ordination is presented, which incorporates various types of agents responsible for managing their respective activities. The co-ordinated approach, which is implemented within the Design Co-ordination System, includes features such as resource management and monitoring, dynamic scheduling, activity direction, task enactment, and information management. An application of the Design Co-ordination System, in conjunction with a robust concept exploration tool, shows that the computational design analysis involved in evaluating many design concepts can be performed more efficiently through a co-ordinated approach