BPM in Healthcare 2nd Edition
(Digital Edition, download immediately)

Foreword by Charles Webster MD

Size: 140 pages PDF / 10MB.

Digital BENEFITS: Enjoy immediate PDF download, live URLs, searchable text, graphics and charts in color. No shipping charges. Delivered in unzipped PDF; mobile device-friendly.

This updated and expanded edition brings the reader the latest updates on this important sector of industry with completely new content, following the first edition.

Hospitals, State entities and pharmaceutical companies continue to embrace BPM as a means to improve operational efficiency, achieve patient safety goals and positively influence the quality of care.

This Book explores the opportunities BPM and workflow technology have to make a profound impact on patient care while examining the challenges that are present in the healthcare arena.

Other titles in the BPM and Workflow eBook Series...
* Healthcare (first edition) (size 185 pages, 8MB zipped file) 
* Introduction to BPM and Workflow (Size: 130 pages, 3MB)
* Financial Services (Size: 265 pages, 10 MB zipped file.)
* Utilities and Telecommunications (152 pages, 5MB)

BPM in Healthcare

Bonus Content!
Podcast by Foreword Author, Charles Webster:
Workflow is Key to Managing Healthcare Process - Get Social Health

This new Edition presents the collection of best and most important chapters on healthcare recently published in the annual BPM Handbook and Excellence in Practice series and our other publications.

BPM’s promises are real, but the path to success is often littered with pitfalls and shortcuts to failure.

This book is going to appeal to those getting into BPM in Healthcare and struggling to engage colleagues into the journey. It provides realistic and pragmatic guidance on how to approach BPM initiatives, along with a wide range of modern case studies developed by those who have undertaken real BPM programs.

For those setting out on the BPM journey, you'll find the direct guidance on business case development and ROI calculation examples particularly useful. Perhaps more importantly, the case study authors also share their real-world best practices and pitfalls to avoid.

Best practices can help you avoid pitfalls. If you are just embarking on using its methods and tools, these authors have a wealth of experience to learn from and build on. Whether you are a business manager in an end-user environment, a supplier of BPM products or services, or a technology practitioner, this special collection of papers will provide valuable information about what BPM can do for you—and how to apply it.

Section One: Overview

Marketing Intelligent BPM to Healthcare Intelligently

Charles Webster, MD, MSIE, MSIS

Health information technology (HIT) professionals who learn about business process management (BPM) technology are usually impressed.  Nonetheless, BPM has been slow to diffuse into healthcare. HIT has technologies corresponding to some BPM suite core components. But process orchestration engines remain rare. Fortunately, there are signs that the HIT market is entering a period of greater need and appreciation for BPM ideas, products, and services. I describe the cur-rent state of affairs within the health IT industry and suggest how BPM vendors can engage, educate, and communicate, about BPM’    s unique value to healthcare and health IT.

Using Bpm To Drive Clinical Intelligence And Process Oversight In The Acute Healthcare Setting

Ray Hess, The Chester County Hospital, USA

The environment of the acute hospital setting is a complex compilation of intricate processes. The healthcare worker is challenged to manage and coordinate many diverse aspects of their patients’ care effectively. There is an ever-increasing bur-den of care options and requirements that need to be considered. The use of business process management to help automate and control patient care has been shown to be effective in improving this care burden. However, the healthcare sector has been very slow to adopt BPM. There are many reasons for this phenomenon. Clinical care processes are very complex and often do not have easily defined beginning and ending points. They tend to overlap and disrupt other workflows based on the details of the individual process. A complex matrix of conditions can change the logic for dealing with event-based data elements and the way a system should react to those events. The clinical users tend to be very mobile and are not electronically connected for extended periods of their day. These are just a few of the challenges facing healthcare process automation.

Patient-Centered Healthcare, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia

Nahid Althqafi, Hessah Alsalamah, and Ahmad Daraiseh, King Saud University, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Saudi Arabia

Access Control to patients’ medical information in Hospital Information Systems (HIS) is a challenge in modern Patient-Centered (PC) healthcare.  Fine–Grained Access Control (FGAC) in particular has been identified as one of the security requirements in these systems. In FGAC, only parts of medical information that are relevant and required by healthcare providers are accessed at the point of care.  This cannot be achieved without a holistic view of a medical condition through a Patient-Centered Fine-Grained Access Control (PCFGAC), in which patient-centricity is considered. This project uses Business Process Management (BPM) to achieve PCFGAC in an aim to provide a real-time access control based on a “need-to-know” principle.   Through a prototype that uses Business Process Management System (BPMS) tool to model two healthcare treatments, the proposal is illustrated. The results showed that security requirements of PCFGAC were met by using the support that BPMS facilitates.  These include:  authority control, in-formed decision support, fine-grained access control, and dynamic policies support. Thus, a contribution to the knowledge and practice has been introduced.

My Sandbox, Your Sandbox

Keith D Swenson, Fujitsu America

Case management helps support knowledge workers when the work to be done is not predictable in advance. Not all knowledge workers use the same case management system, which means that, to collaborate, a given knowledge worker might be required to use many different systems. Different systems will naturally allow different operations with different capabilities, and this is a significant usability challenge.

The proposed solution is to allow a knowledge worker to copy a case to the system with which they are familiar, and to maintain synchronization of the copied contents with the original, so that a knowledge worker can perform the work supported by a system with which they are familiar. This paper presents a scheme for accomplishing this kind of federated case management system, and introduces the personal assistant as an important element in making this federation work.

Section Two: Proof of Success

Cognocare And ACM-Based System For Oncology

Nominated by IActive US Corp, US

Cognocare is an ACM-based Clinical Decision Support System for Oncology that interprets clinical guidelines and expert knowledge, enabling a true dynamic and knowledge-based process generation based on Artificial Intelligence, where these processes are personalized treatments, adapted to each single patient condition. Physicians use it as an assistant to design, follow-up, modify and update fully detailed treatment processes in a very flexible environment.

National Institute Of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAIAID)

Nominated by OpenText Corporation, Canada

As part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is responsible for biomedical research on infectious diseases. Much of NIAID’s research budget is used to fund re-search by external organizations. To support rapid modernization across the organization—not just isolated, department-level solutions—NIAID implemented a platform for electronic document management and process automation. NIAID has successfully used its platform in more than 50 projects, building and reusing application components to quickly streamline varied processes across the institute. As a result, NIAID has significantly increased the efficiency of its grants and awards processes as well as its internal operations. Reviews and approvals that once took weeks to complete are now finished in just a few days.

Pediatric Hospital “Bambino Gesu” Kidney Transplant Integrated Care Pathway

Nominated by Openwork Srl, Italy

More than 20 kidney transplants are performed every year at Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital (OPBG), the largest pediatric hospital and research center in Europe and one of the highest-qualified pediatric centers in the world, with over 200 patients to be monitored with a rigorous post-transplant Integrated Clinical Pathway (ICP) managed by a multidisciplinary clinical team. In the Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital context, we are dealing with children, a vulnerable population that require a range of additional, coordinated, high-quality, child- and family-centered support services. The project uses a BPM platform to develop and deploy the ICP for transplanted children by “mapping” the ICP onto BPM platform to support the implementation of best practice already successful adopted at Kidney Transplant Department at OPBG.

Prince Sultan Military Medical City, Saudi Arabia

Nominated by Bizagi, UK

Prince Sultan Military Medical City (PSMMC) formerly known as The Riyadh Military Hospital (RMH) is located in Riyadh City and considered as one of the most advanced medical centres in the Middle East. PSMMC is the Medical Services Department (MSD) for the Ministry of Defense (MOD). The hospital now has a capacity of more than 1,400 beds and employs over 12,000 staff.

Key challenges faced by the hospital were related to patient safety. These included identifying the right patient, providing the right treatment to the right patient and preventing identification fraud and misuse of medical services by patients.

Existing legacy system used by the Patient Affairs department could not address these challenges. A BPM system was introduced to streamline and manage the improved processes of various departments associated with Patient Affairs. PSMMC has already had a positive experience after the Family and Community Department, Al-Wazarat Health Centre (WHC), was automated with over 70 processes last year. The system delivered end to end patient care for over 2,000 outpatients. The success of the first BPM initiative encouraged the PSMMC management team to consider the same BPM solution for this much larger initiative which required the end-to end automation of a 1400 bed hospital, serving the big part of the city.

Key drivers for both projects was to deliver a highly intuitive system that medical professionals can use daily and easily and that helps to improve patients care and reduce costs.

State of Hawaii, Department of Human Services, U. S.

Nominated by Imagine Solutions, U.S.

Who: Citizens of Hawaii seeking services and support for food, shelter, childcare assistance, employment support and work training, and dependency diversion and prevention.

What: State of Hawaii, Department of Human Services (DHS), Benefit, Employment and Support Services Division (BESSD). BESSD is the largest division in the Department of Human Services and provides services through nine programs that serve different populations. There are 14 processing centers statewide with a total of 34 physical locations.

Why: A common theme with Health and Human Service agencies is tackling an increasing need for citizen support by leveraging case management solutions (CMS). For Hawaii’s BESSD, did so their objective was to improve data quality, eliminate errors, and manage more efficiently an increasing number of cases, without increasing staff, as well as to eliminate the restriction for citizen documentation to only be accessible at one location, on any island.

State of Maine, USA

Nominated by Pegasystems, USA

Under the directive of its CIO, Jim Smith, the State of Maine launched a transformation into a digital enterprise built on top of a BPM solution. The goal – create an organization with the agility to adapt to market changes and provide superior customer services, replicating the operations of market-leading commercial organizations. This philosophy is unique to state government. Supporting the State of Maine’s emergence as a BPM thought leader, is the establishment of an Enterprise BPM Center of Excellence, to ensure the state continually evolves and expands its operations through the use of BPM.

The State of Maine’s successful first rollout was an application to bridge the State’s unemployment insurance benefits and tax systems. The state then began to deploy this model into other internal functions, operations and initiatives including licensing. This was all built to increase efficiency using BPM, CRM, and case management combined in a single platform.

Key to Maine’s decision was the ability to deploy via a secure and reliable cloud platform including the ability to easily and safely move applications and/or data to and from the cloud while maintaining security, privacy, regulatory and compliance requirements. Maine’s visionary approach sets the standard for government and private sector alike.

Velindre Hospital Integrated Care Pathway

Nominated by Cardiff School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, UK

Teamwork, collaboration and coordination are key aspects of the patient-centric approach taken by modern healthcare. Although many projects have been and are currently being undertaken to improve support for healthcare professionals, adequate support for teamwork, communication and coordination has yet to be achieved. The delivery of the healthcare service is very challenging as it involves heterogeneous distributed systems, multi-professionals and dependent tasks among each. In addition, the treatment journey of each patient is unique, as decisions are usually made according to several constraints related to the patient, medical condition, patient’s choice, available resources and\or feedback from doctors’ consultation.

Westmed Practice Partners, USA

Nominated by Hyland, creator of OnBase®, USA

Providing high-quality services through cutting-edge technology is the longtime mission of WESTMED Practice Partners (WPP). However, with thousands of policies and procedures supporting its multispecialty practice facility clients, WPP was challenged to effectively manage all processes.

Searching for a solution to these challenges, Dr. Simeon Schwartz, WPP’s Chairman and CEO, found inspiration in a checklist approach to healthcare – as well-documented in Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto. This led WPP to look for a software solution that would help WPP build checklist-style applications to improve process quality, consistency and outcomes, both for the organization itself and its hospital system clients.

WPP partnered with its enterprise content management (ECM) vendor to implement these applications using its comprehensive case management platform. WPP used the flexible platform to design and deploy a wide variety of applications supporting processes enterprise-wide. These range from more standard case-based applications to unique checklist-driven applications for process control in areas like IT help desk, labs and medical testing, front desk, patient billing, new site openings, human resources and physician compensation.

Further resources on BPM in Healthcare

http://chuckwebster.com/task-and-workflow-interoperability-in-healthcare 

http://chuckwebster.com/pragmatic-interoperability