Healthcare Enterprise Process Development and Integration (original) (raw)
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Integrating the healthcare enterprise process
International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management, 2008
Integrating the healthcare enterprise (IHE) is an initiative where healthcare professionals and industry providers work together to improve the way healthcare computer systems share information and achieve a high level of interoperability. With IHE, the care providers identify the needs for integration, and manufacturers implement solutions, providing systems that communicate better, are easier to deploy and less expensive to maintain. Successfully implemented in such clinical domains as radiology, laboratory services and cardiology, IHE is expanding into new domains, such as ophthalmology and medical devices, and solving integration problems common to all clinical domains, including patient management, order management, registry, security and document sharing. In this paper, we describe and analyse the collaborative and rigorous IHE process that delivers faster, more efficient and cost-effective systems integration and show how IHE can help healthcare policymakers, executives, and professionals to achieve optimal patient care.
Research Challenges for Achieving Healthcare Business Process Interoperability
2009 International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine, 2009
E-Health systems' interoperability constitutes one of the main challenges of the IT society. E-Health interoperability will not occur without a shared policy and a process framework that will support appropriate business collaboration models and provide a sustainable environment in which interoperable solutions can be created, deployed, and managed. Coordinated business interactions require a common understanding of business function even though alternative delivery mechanisms and channels may be employed. In the healthcare context, a patient visits various organizations or units within organizations to get proper treatment. The role of "healthcare workflow-management by use of IT" is to adjust the contributions of those organizations or units in terms of effective service provision, appropriate timing, and best quality. Workflow management technology can play an important role, for it helps to organize, automate and improve business processes. Supporting clinical processes with information technology requires workflow specification (i.e., the identification of tasks, procedural steps, input and output information, people and departments involved, and the management of information flow according to this specification).
Process Oriented Information Systems Architectures in Healthcare
Health Informatics Journal, 2003
An important insight in business management during recent years is the awareness that organisations need to focus on the processes that create value for their customers. This is in order to see to that value is created as efficiently as possible and that unnecessary or redundant activity is avoided. As a consequence, the organisations' IT support need to interact with business processes in a better way than is currently the case. Healthcare is by no means an exception, but also here there is a great need to concentrate on the processes for transparent communication between various actors and organisations, and between IT systems. Therefore, a new type of process oriented integration architectures has been developed by means of what may be referred to as process managers, which closely reflect the business processes. These are software devices that visualise the integration by means of graphical and easy to understand process models that also facilitate management and monitoring of the processes and their integration requirements. This paper discusses benefits and difficulties for healthcare of introducing an IS architecture based on process manager technology. The discussion is based on experiences from a project, in which a process manager is introduced to integrate IT systems over the patient process and involving several healthcare organisations. Results indicate that healthcare processes are indeed quite complex and involve much communication with various individuals and organisation. Particular problems are caused by communication across organisational borders due to e.g. security issues. However, process manager technology offers help in that it is able both to manage and monitor processes and to make communication with and between IT systems simpler and safer.
The use of Health Information Technology (HIT) to improve healthcare service delivery is constantly increasing due to research advances in medical science and information systems. Having a fully automated process solution for a Healthcare Organization (HCO) requires a combination of organizational strategies along with a selection of technologies that facilitate the goal of improving clinical outcomes. HCOs, requires dynamic management of care capability to realize the full potential of HIT. Business Process Management (BPM) is being increasingly adopted to streamline the healthcare service delivery and management processes. Emergency Departments (EDs) provide a case in point, that require multidisciplinary resources and services to deliver effective clinical outcomes. Managed care involves the coordination of a range of services in an ED. Although fully automated processes in emergency care provide a cutting edge example of service delivery, there are many situations that require human interactions with the computerized systems; e.g. Medication Approvals, care transfer, acute patient care. This requires a coordination mechanism for all the resources, computer and human, to work side by side to provide the best care. To ensure evidence-based medical practice in ED, we have designed a Human Task Management service to model the process of coordination of ED resources based on the UK’s NICE Clinical guideline for managing the care of acutely ill patients. This functionality is implemented using Java Business process Management (jBPM)
Healthcare processes require the cooperation of different healthcare providers and medical disciplines. In such an environment, the quality and safety of care rely heavily on the ability to exchange information from one software to another, and from one person to another. However, information systems that support a seamless flow of information along healthcare processes are not broadly used in healthcare environments. Usually, healthcare organizations have their own autonomously developed information systems that do not support the cooperation of different organizational units and medical disciplines. This has led to the fragmentation of the patients’ information in proprietary heterogeneous systems across healthcare organizations. The aim of this paper is to: (1) explore how healthcare practitioners´ in Sweden experience information system support in their daily work activities, and (2) present and illustrate how key design principles of a process support system prototype can suppo...
Object-aware Process Support in Healthcare Information Systems
2013
Abstract—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.
Understanding requirements for computer-aided healthcare workflows
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering, 2006
Medical informatics and software engineering researchers have studied how to use software technologies to define, analyze, automate, and provide decision support for healthcare workflows. We, as the requirement engineering and prototyping group of the Siemens R&D center, have been involved in the research and development of healthcare workflows. During interactions with the workflow users and developers, we found significant confusion about the terminologies and the purposes of supporting different healthcare workflows. Thus, we are motivated to classify computer-aided healthcare workflows, including their approaches, goals, and major characteristics. This paper also discusses workflow application issues and software challenges based upon our experiences and research.
Informatics
The evolution of technology in clinical environments increases the level of precision in patient care, as well as optimizes the management of healthcare centers. However, the need to have information systems that are more sophisticated and require interoperability between them means that a great deal of effort has to be made to assume the maintenance and scalability of the systems. Therefore, a proposal for a standard information model for the integration of clinical systems in a healthcare environment is presented. In order to elaborate the model, an analysis of the functional needs of the different clinical areas of a clinical environment is made based on the information systems that make up the system and application map. An evaluation of the technical requirements and the technological solutions that can satisfy these requirements is also carried out, delving into the different technical alternatives that allow the exchange of information. From the analysis carried out, an integ...
Guest EditorialIntegrated Healthcare Information Systems
IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 2000
The use of integrated information systems for health-3 care has been started more than a decade ago. In recent years, 4 rapid advances in information integration methods have spurred 5 tremendous growth in the use of integrated information systems in 6 healthcare delivery. Various techniques have been used for prob-7 ing such integrated systems. These techniques include SOA, EAI, Q1 8 workflow management, grid computing, and others. Many applica-9 tions require a combination of these techniques, which gives rise to 10 the emergence of enterprise systems in healthcare. Development of 11 the techniques originated from different disciplines has the poten-12 tial to significantly improve the performance of enterprise systems 13 in healthcare. This editorial paper briefly introduces the enterprise 14 systems in the perspective of healthcare informatics. 15 Index Terms-Enterprise information systems (EIS), enterprise 16 systems (ES), industrial information integration engineering, inte-17 grated healthcare information systems, IT in biomedicine. 18 I. INTEGRATED INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR HEALTHCARE 19 R ESEARCH indicates that Integrated Healthcare Informa-20 tion Systems are becoming an essential part of the modern 21 healthcare systems. Such systems have evolved to integrated 22 technology applications in healthcare with topics such as e-97 health care, electronic health record system, interoperability 98 and connectivity, regional and community health information 99 networks, hospital information systems, disease management 100 systems, telemedicine, etc. 101 The paper by Trigo et al. applied ES techniques to cardio-102 vascular condition monitoring [15]. Authors claimed that the 103 heterogeneity in existing environment causes the lack of in-104 tegrated healthcare information systems. As such, there is a 105 need for an appropriate integration of ECGs and a suitable ES-106 based architecture enabling standardized exchange and homo-107 geneous management of ECGs. Determining such integration 108 is one of the main objectives of this paper. The ES-enabling 109 techniques selected include SOAP, BPEL, and others that en-Q2 110 sure the standardized exchange of ECGs within and across the 111 healthcare information systems while providing modularity and 112 accessibility. 113 Providing decision support among clinicians across organi-114 zational and regional boundaries is a main challenge for the 115 development of integrated ES for e-healthcare. In the paper by 116 Tawfik et al., a user-centered study aimed to investigate clinical 117 practices across three different geographical areas-the U.K., 118 the UAE, and Nigeria-is presented [16]. The paper proposes a 119 set of design guidelines for the development of enterprise health-120 care information systems for e-healthcare. The paper proposes 121 the conceptual design of CaDHealth, a framework for clinical 122 practices for effective cross-boundary e-healthcare.
Healthcare Process Support: Achievements, Challenges, Current Research
2012
Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering high-quality services to their patients at affordable costs. To tackle this challenge, the Medical Informatics community targets at formalisms for developing decision-support systems (DSSs) based on clinical guidelines. At the same time, business process management (BPM) enables IT support for healthcare processes, e.g., based on workflow technology. By integrating aspects from these two fields, promising perspectives for achieving better healthcare process support arise. The perspectives and limitations of IT support for healthcare processes provided the focus of three Workshops on Process-oriented Information Systems (ProHealth). These were held in conjunction with the International Conference on Business Process Management in 2007-2009. The ProHealth workshops provided a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized process support in healthcare were debated. Following the success of these workshops, this special issue on process support in healthcare provides extended papers by research groups who contributed multiple times to the ProHealth workshop series. These works address issues pertaining to healthcare process modeling, process-aware healthcare information system, workflow management in healthcare, IT support for guideline implementation and medical decision support, flexibility in healthcare processes, process interoperability in healthcare and healthcare standards, clinical semantics of healthcare processes, healthcare process patterns, best practices for designing healthcare processes, and healthcare process validation, verification, and evaluation.