Short Link: http://ehr.bz/sie
Siemens Healthcare has been a pioneer in bringing business process management technology to healthcare, starting with the Soarian hospital EHR workflow management system over a decade ago. I’ve written about Soarian and Siemens here in my EHR Workflow Management Systems blog. I included material about Siemens Soarian in my three-hour tutorial on EHR Workflow Management Systems at the old TEPR conference. And I occasionally tweet about them from my account.
More and more BPM vendors are getting into the deeper end of the healthcare swimming pool, closer and closer to clinical patient care. It’s a big project to educate healthcare and health IT about process-aware information systems such as Soarian. It’s a paradigm shift (#3 in my Ten Reasons EHR-BPM Tech Is Not (Yet) Widely Deployed in Healthcare) from mere structured documents to robust structured workflows. So I was delighted to see this crisp, clear and concise description of the benefits of business process management and complex-event processing in a healthcare and hospital context.
Some people like to skim text and others like to watch video. For the readers like me, I transcribed the interview (30 seconds versus two minutes?). It’s also a way to make sure the search engines find this important material. After the interview I added some links to related blog posts about topics mentioned in the interview.
“My name is Tommy Richardson [ on Twitter]. I’m the Chief Technology Officer and VP for Technology for Siemens Healthcare
To us what is most exciting about TIBCO is that most companies out there today are hardcoding when building their systems. They’ve got hardcoded rules, hardcoded workflows, hardcoded integrations.
What’s exciting to us about TIBCO is using TIBCO’s BPM and enterprise service bus to build much more flexible and systems that can be much more easily extended for our clients. So you can think about some hospitals have certain workflows when you go to emergency. Others may want to change that and say when [the patient] first comes in skip the insurance collection and send him back to the room if he’s seriously hurt.
So we’re using the tools TIBCO has given us to build this tremendous flexibility into the system, where we can have different workflows for the hospital organizations and the hospitals organizations can even change and update the workflows we deliver with TIBCO’s products today.
TIBCO’s technologies are extremely important to us.
The data that’s changing in our systems is flowing over the TIBCO enterprise service bus. Using the complex event processing, the workflow, and the rules allow us to get a two-second advantage.
So we can look at the data that is changing immediately, whether it’s from taking someone’s blood pressure and knowing there’s a problem to monitoring their cardiac test to discharge to admission. All the different events that happen in healthcare you can use the TIBCO tools to, in a second or two, make real life-determining decisions.
That’s the really key thing about healthcare that’s certainly different from other industries. Other industries are using the tools to make dollars. We’re using it to save peoples’ lives.
That brings chills up my spine just talking about it.
That’s the special stuff.”
Special indeed!
Great interview! Reminds me of my infamous HatCam One-Minute Interviews (well, length- and content-wise, though not production quality).
If you’d like to learn more about EHR workflow technology and EHR complex event processing, I hope you’ll check out some of the following links:
- Could Dutch Computer Scientist Wil van der Aalst Save U.S. Healthcare 600 Billion Dollars?
- The evil of hardcoded workflows (I call these “frozen workflows”)
- Different organizations (and providers) have different workflows
- Healthcare organizations (and providers) should be able to edit workflows
- Complex event processing (CEP)/Eventing systems
- EMRs and EHRs Need to Solve “The BPM Problem”: Why Not Use BPM to Help Do So?