Trip Report: Day 1 BPM & Case Management Global Summit

Now in it’s third year, the BPM & Case Management Global Summit is my favorite annual conference (BPM stands for Business Process Management). I love the annual HIMSS conference, for its size, energy, and grandeur, but 41K plus attendees can be overwhelming. (its Twitter hashtag) is just right, just a couple hundred of the smartest workflow tech folks around. Oh the conversations!

This is not a blow-by-blow coverage of every keynote and breakout session and demo I saw. It is, as it usually is, a selective search for the healthcare workflow relevant ideas. (Here is my trip report from a couple years ago.) Also, as usual, I’ll use my tweets during the first day of the conference as a sort of graphical, social backbone to this post.

I arrive early, because (BPMCM16 organizer) serves one excellent Ritz-Carlton breakfast.

We kick off with super keynote from Ron Ross (, NIST, on cybersecurity. Several of the questions after Ron’s talk touched on the role of BPM in creating more secure IT systems. (By the way, see my list of five ways BPM can make health IT systems more secure.)

The second keynote was delivered by the always passionate Clay Richardson ().

I’ve written before about Clay’s exciting ideas on how to use BPM to connect data and workflow silos into “empathic workflow” reflecting and supporting customer journey. While he did not directly visit healthcare, in previous presentations one of his examples was about a daughter worried about her mother falling, her mother feeling anxious and ambivalent, and using backend BPM connecting legacy systems to better support their customer journey.

My favorite breakout session was “Supporting Complex environments with BPM” presented by Steve Kruba (), Northrop Grumman. Here are a couple of his healthcare-relevant slides. BPM is the “glue” connecting disparate applications. I’d say this is healthcare-relevant, because this is exactly what healthcare needs, see my series on Pragmatic Interoperability.

Here is a screencapture of the healthcare workflows, connecting people and systems, that Steve created with Northrop Grumman’s e-Power BPM suite. Note, these are not just pretty workflow pictures. These workflows are executable. Changing the workflow “picture” changes the workflow application behavior.

And here is Steve’s summary slides. Read it. Healthcare needs this.

My talk, on the relevance of BPM to healthcare, came off without a hitch. If you follow the link from the tweet you’ll find a complete video, all the slides, transcribed!

Every year I see some cool new technology (new to me, often they’ve been around for years, but just not in healthcare yet). This year the product was Kintone. Here Jana Berman (Account Exec at Kintone) is demoing enabling “process management” in Kintone, that is, popping open the workflow editors, adding, moving workflow steps, tweaking their business logic, etc. Previously Jana showed how easy it is for users to create and edit screens. If you put together non-programmer users creating both screens and workflow, well that is what is increasingly called a “citizen developer.” Healthcare needs citizen developers. This demo was about sales leads. But just think about clinical and health management users creating their own workflows. (Reminds me of the Maker Movement, which I’ve written about here… Makers in Healthcare | Health Standards)

Kintone is no new wet-behind-the-ears startup. 4,000 companies and 130,00 users have created 250,000 workflow apps. This kind of low-code/even no-code workflow application creating could transform healthcare (and I should note Kintone is not the only company in this space). Imagine if healthcare users could create and customize their own software screens and workflows…

I spoke with Dave Landa (), who heads up US operations. Kintone is working with a number of US healthcare organizations. I’m excited to see the results of these partnerships.

Two more highlights. During my talk about BPM in healthcare I mentioned process mining. Scott Opitz (), President & CEO of TimelinePI () came up to introduce himself and his company. What he said was fascinating, from a healthcare workflow informatics point-of-view. I’ve not yet seen any demos, but I do wish to include this quote from TimelinePI.com.

“TimelinePI is specifically designed with one purpose – to provide a new view into operational data focused on business processes. The TimelinePI engine consumes data from a variety of sources, often the same exact data being used today for other simpler analyses, to detect and present detailed views of your business processes. This new insight is delivered via a variety of new process and timeline visualization tools developed to not only make these new insights easier to understand but also to allow users to manipulate the information to gain deeper understanding of those processes. Users armed with this insight have concrete facts on which to take actions to improve operational efficiency by promoting clearly superior best practices and eliminating costly inefficiencies that previously went undetected.”

Very cool!

One last highlight!

Every time I happen to bump into Keith Swenson () at a workflow tech conference, I systematically pick his brain about his ideas about work, workflow, BPM, case management and related topics, as they relate to healthcare. Keith finds healthcare an interesting area of problem solving and collaboration, and we both agree there’s a great fit between healthcare’s workflow management problems and the BPM industry’s workflow management solutions. During BPMCM16 I enjoyed listing to Keith participate in fascinating debates (especially with ) about how to represent decision making in BPM and case management systems. The results of this debate will be important to better clinical decision support systems in healthcare.

Here are the #BPMCM16 Twitter statistics, as of the morning of the second day of the conference. The reason there appears to be a dip right at the end, is that it is still early, so lots haven’t tweeted yet today. 180 tweets (139 yesterday, during the first day of the conference), 58 tweeters with a potential reach of over a half a million (basically, aggregate users times their followers). Given the intimate size of the conference, these are pretty good statistics!

Thank you Nathaniel Palmer for putting on a great conference. And to Layna Fischer () for capturing Nathaniel in is element! 🙂

Have a great second day of the BPM and Case Management Global Summit!


On Periscope!

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