CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES WITH INFORMATION SYSTEM SUPPORT FOR HEALTHCARE PROCESSES – A HEALTHCARE PRACTITIONER PERSPECTIVE (original) (raw)
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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.
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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.
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).
A management information system model for process-oriented health care
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2004
To develop a conceptual model of a management information system for process-oriented health care organizations. Qualitative data was collected from two case studies in process-oriented health care settings. The first study addressed the information requirements of health care managers and the second study focused on organizational activities and clinical practice. From these data, preliminary models were iteratively developed, interpreted, and further revised. A county hospital in southern Sweden with 30 clinics and 3,200 employees. A conceptual model of a management information system for process-oriented health care organizations was developed in two parts: one part that describes the organizational interface of the model and the other part that describes the architecture of the model. A conceptual model has been developed for local-level integration of management information systems and organizational procedures in process-oriented health care organizations
Healthcare Enterprise Process Development and Integration
Journal of Research and …, 2003
Healthcare enterprises involve complex processes that span diverse groups and organisations. These processes involve clinical and administrative tasks, large volumes of data, and large numbers of patients and personnel. The tasks can be performed either by humans or by automated systems. In the latter case, the tasks are supported by a variety of software applications and information systems which are very often heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed. The development of systems to manage and automate these processes has increasingly played an important role in improving the efficiency of healthcare enterprises.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2011
Objective There is a need to integrate the various theoretical frameworks and formalisms for modeling clinical guidelines, workflows, and pathways, in order to move beyond providing support for individual clinical decisions and toward the provision of process-oriented, patient-centered, health information systems (HIS). In this review, we analyze the challenges in developing process-oriented HIS that formally model guidelines, workflows, and care pathways. Methods A qualitative meta-synthesis was performed on studies published in English between 1995 and 2010 that addressed the modeling process and reported the exposition of a new methodology, model, system implementation, or system architecture. Thematic analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and data visualisation techniques were used to identify and cluster the underlying implementation 'challenge' themes. Results One hundred and eight relevant studies were selected for review. Twenty-five underlying 'challenge' themes were identified. These were clustered into 10 distinct groups, from which a conceptual model of the implementation process was developed. Discussion and conclusion We found that the development of systems supporting individual clinical decisions is evolving toward the implementation of adaptable care pathways on the semantic web, incorporating formal, clinical, and organizational ontologies, and the use of workflow management systems. These architectures now need to be implemented and evaluated on a wider scale within clinical settings.
Information in health care process - evaluation toolkit development
36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the, 2003
Increasing health care costs put a great strain on national economies. In recent years there have been several national and regional research and development projects in Finland and in the Netherlands with attempt to generate new modes and means of health care service processes. The aim is at better utilisation of the existing social and health care resources, improved quality of service and rationalisation of business processes without compromising high quality of care. Increased cooperation between the various actors and institutions of health care is essential in achieving this aim. "Adaptability of processes", "networking" and "seamless service chains" are key words in this development. Information technology plays an important role in traditional business process designing. Both high hopes and large investments have been put in acquisition and implementation of health care information systems without exact evidence of their influence on the process itself. An information system has to appropriately support the flow, acquisition and handling of information needed within the process. The solutions should be both effective and cost-effective. However, implementing a new system or changing an existing one may have a profound, unexpected effect on work and service processes. From health care organisations' point of view, evaluation of information systems facilitates the utilisation of existing information and communication technology (ICT) solutions. Hence, a comprehensive set of evaluation tools is needed to facilitate the health service providers' work. This paper examines issues that have been studied in the ongoing research project that aims at compiling such toolkit.
Introducing a process manager in healthcare: an experience report
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To be efficient and patient focused, healthcare units need to be process oriented and integrated with the processes and IT systems of other healthcare units. A process manager facilitates integration of different systems by using graphical and executable process models. The process manager also communicates directly with healthcare personnel via desktop computers and mobile devices. This article reports on a Swedish project where a prototype system was developed and tested with several healthcare units. The experience shows several advantages and opportunities. For example, current information about patients can be transferred automatically between healthcare units; resource intensive manual tasks can be replaced with automated tasks; and long-term process monitoring and quality assessment can be enabled. However, introducing a process manager requires attention to issues of security, ethics and legality. Healthcare units may also show differences in security awareness and IT maturity, which could obstruct the introduction of a process manager.
Healthcare information systems and the healthcare professional's role
Trakia Journal of Sciences, 2010
A review is made of sources to show phases in development of a healthcare information system. More healthcare professionals use the IT technology in their practice. The purpose of the article is to familiarize healthcare professionals with the phases of developing an information system. Medical specialists in particular area can demonstrate their knowledge in the field of IT technologies by participating in the development of an information system. Key words: healthcare information system, technology, medical specialists, IT specialists