Updated 4/13/14: added link to full text of pdf chapter!
I contributed a chapter to a new book: How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done: Real-World Adaptive Case Management. There I am! Listed as a co-author on Amazon. Amaz(on)ing! It (the chapter, in keeping with this blog’s theme) is about natural language processing, business process management, and adaptive case management in healthcare.
Natural Language Processing,
BPM and ACM in Healthcare
Two great information technology industries, health IT and workflow IT, increasingly overlap. Traditional health IT (HIT) has solved many healthcare information management problems, but not others, especially involving complex processes and workflows. Over several decades business process management (BPM) and case management systems have had great success automating workflow and supporting problem solving that requires human interpretation, creativity, and guidance. Nonetheless, within the BPM community a debate has raged over where and what to automate and how to support Drucker’s “knowledge worker.” These issues, and their resolution, are central and critical to a parallel debate within healthcare about usability of electronic health records (EHR) and HIT and effects on physician productivity and patient safety. The BPM and adaptive case management debate is reviewed and lessons drawn for creating efficient, effective, and flexible EHR and HIT workflows. P.S. Plus a dash of natural language processing!
That’s my chapter. The book is How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done: Real-World Adaptive Case Management.
It (the book) is about software systems that support users engaged in a variety of unstructured and structured tasks, sometimes at almost the same moment. The book is highly relevant to design of electronic health records and other health information technology systems. A couple of my blog posts may whet your appetite for getting and reading How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done.
- Well- vs. Ill-Structured Problems, Adaptive Case Management, and Clinical Groupware
- EMRs and EHRs Need to Solve “The BPM Problem”: Why Not Use BPM to Help Do So?
- 10 Questions for Nuance’s Dr. Nick on Clinical Language Understanding
Here’s the book description (full Table of Contents below):
How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done:
Real-World Adaptive Case Management
Highly predictable work is easy to support using traditional programming techniques, while unpredictable work cannot be accurately scripted in advance, and thus requires the involvement of the knowledge workers themselves. The core element of Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is the support for real-time decision-making by knowledge workers. How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done describes the work of managers, decision makers, executives, doctors, lawyers, campaign managers, emergency responders, strategist, and many others who have to think for a living. These are people who figure out what needs to be done, at the same time that they do it, and there is a new approach to support this presents the logical starting point for understanding how to take advantage of ACM.
Keith Swenson points out: “We are seeing a fundamental shift in our workforce, and in the ways they need to be managed. Not only are companies engaging their customers in new ways, but managers are engaging workers in similarly transformed ways.”
In award-winning case studies covering industries as a diverse as law enforcement, transportation, insurance, banking, state services, and healthcare, you will find instructive examples for how to transform your own organization.
In a brilliant move, timing-wise, How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done: Real-World Adaptive Case Management is being published today, October 18th, smack dab in the middle of National Case Management Week (cached).
Now, why do I think this is brilliant timing? Well, I’ve been told by more than one person that the phrase “case management” owes some provenance to that same phrase in healthcare (and social work and law too). There’s a brochure covering the history of the idea for National Case Management Week.
Here are the relevant paragraphs:
Case management is a collaborative process of assessment, planning, facilitation, care coordination, evaluation, and advocacy for options and services to meet an individual’s and family’s comprehensive health needs through communication and available resources to promote quality cost-effective outcomes.
Care managers are advocates who help patients understand their current health status, what they can do about it and why those treatments are important.
In this way, care managers are catalysts by guiding patients and providing cohesion to other professionals in the health care delivery team, enabling their clients to achieve goals more effectively and efficiently.
Let’s really parse that first paragraph definition of case management.
- Case management is a collaborative process of
- assessment,
- planning,
- facilitation,
- care coordination,
- evaluation,
- and advocacy
- for options and services to meet
- an individual’s
- and family’s
- comprehensive health needs
- through communication
- and available resources
- to promote quality cost-effective outcomes.
To me what is remarkable about this definition of case management is that it also defines what I believe electronic healthcare records should do. Assessment, planning, facilitation, care coordination, evaluation, and, yes, even advocacy are what EHRs should do very well, but do not yet do well at all. By the way, the official tagline of for the National Case Management Association is “Case Management: The GPS for Quality Health Care.” I’ve seen this same analogy in the business process management industry. EHRs and other health IT systems need to become more like GPS for healthcare processes.
I could present, for comparison and contrast, descriptions of and (and and ). There’s tremendous potential for building EHRs on these platforms. But let me note that there’s quite a debate about evolution of case management and business process management. Terminology is still settling. This debate is healthy. How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done: Real-World Adaptive Case Management is part of this debate. Healthcare will benefit from ensuing products and services.
But I’m not going to do that here. This post is about the new book How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done: Real-World Adaptive Case Management and my chapter Natural Language Processing, BPM and ACM in Healthcare.
So here’s that complete Table of Contents I promised you! (full abstracts):
Contents
- Foreword: The Process-Driven Business Of 2020 (Connie Moore, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc., USA)
- The Strategic Business Benefits of Adaptive Case Management (Max J. Pucher, Isis Papyrus)
- How ACM Drives Better Customer Engagement (Dermot McCauley, Kofax, Inc.)
- Case Management Forecast: Mostly PCM with a Chance of ACM (John T. Matthias, National Center for State Courts, United States)
- Types of Business Process (Keith Harrison-Broninski, Role Modellers Ltd.)
- Distribute Process Knowledge in ACM through Mentoring (Frank Michael Kraft, AdaPro GmbH and Hajo Normann, Accenture)
- Managing Structured and Unstructured Processes Under the Same Umbrella (Alberto Manuel, Process Sphere, Portugal)
- Natural Language Processing, BPM and ACM in Healthcare: Memoir of a Radio Interview (Charles Webster, MD, MSIE, MSIS)
- Case Management Megatrends (Nathaniel Palmer, Workflow Management Coalition)
- Case Management: Contrasting Production vs. Adaptive (Keith D. Swenson, Fujitsu America, Inc., and Workflow Management Coalition)
- Section 2: Case Studies
- Cognocare, an ACM-based System for Oncology (Gold Award: Healthcare)
- Vision Service Plan (VSP) (Silver Award: Healthcare)
- Generali Hellas Insurance Company S.A. (Gold Award: Customer-Facing)
- Fortune-500 Bank, India (Silver Award: Customer-Facing)
- Paneon GmbH, Austria (Gold Award: Knowledge Worker Innovation)
- UWV, The Netherlands (Judges’ Choice Award: Knowledge Worker Innovation)
- MATS Norwegian Food Safety Authority, Norway (Gold Award: Public Sector)
- QSuper, Australia (Silver Award: Public Sector)
- State Office of Children and Family Services, USA (Special Mention: Public Sector)
- Touchstone Health, USA (Finalist: Production Case Management)
- New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS), USA (Finalist: Production Case Management)
- Appendix
- ACM glossary
- About WfMC
- Index
- Further reading recommendations
As you can see from the Table of Contents, there are several healthcare case studies. If you do read How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done: Real-World Adaptive Case Management I hope you’ll come back here to add a comment or two.
By the way, How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done was published by Future Strategies, publisher of many “Unique Books on BPM and Workflow”. I’ve had the good fortune to meet, or interact with online through blogs and Twitter, co-authors and editor, Layna Fischer. So hat tip also to Keith Swenson, Nathaniel Palmer, and Max Pucher
There’s lots of other contributors too. I’ll add embedded tweets about How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done: Real-World Adaptive Case Management below. Many will surely be from chapter authors, or about their chapters from other twepes, in response to book publication.
Amaz(on)ing!
My blog post: New Book has my chapter on & Adaptive Case Management in Healthcare ehr.bz/1e6
— Charles Webster, MD ()
Great book out tomorrow feat. @ @ etc. + success cases in like @ @
— Arturo G. Ferrer ()
New ACM book looks great:”How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done” BOGO see conta.cc/Xk5raM launching at this week.
— Layna Fischer ()
New book launching at Forrester Forum this week: “How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done” conta.cc/Xk5raM
— Layna Fischer ()
Only elementmissing the tree. The book is already here How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done
— Alberto Manuel ()
“How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done” our latest book on Adaptive Case Management, see at Amazon
— Nathaniel Palmer ()
Have to wait 3 weeks and then I finally will know how I can get things done
— Procesje ()
Here’s a complete (i.e. somewhat repetitive) list of recent tweets linking to the book on Amazon.