The Workflow Technology Trophy Goes to & !
— Charles Webster MD ⎌ ()
I searched every website of every Health 2.0 Fall Conference sponsor, 87 in all. I found three companies that emphasize Business Process Management (BPM) and/or workflow engine technology. As I am always trying to encourage more use of workflow tech in healthcare and health IT, I am writing this post to highlight these progressive Health 2.0 sponsors.
The three progressive bringers of workflow technology to healthcare and health IT are…
- Kainos Evolve ()
- Axway ()
- CareCloud ()
From the Kainos Evolve website:
(about use of Alfresco Business Process Management software: very complimentary!)
“When we set out to design our Mobile-Enabled Healthcare Platform one of the biggest decisions we made was to use Alfresco for our Business Process Management (BPM) and Electronic Content Management (ECM) services. This decision had a major impact on our product, and we’re convinced we made the right choice, so I wanted to walk you through how we made it.”
“Workflow processes are a fundamental part of our platform. We have a number of core principles that we use to help guide us when we build product. Firstly, everything we build must be driven by the user need and all our applications must be mobile first, interoperable and extensible. eForms and Workflow is one way we make our platform extensible. We want our customers to use our tools to quickly build forms and model entire care pathways. We want them to do this independently without having to wait on features to be added to a product roadmap. But in a modern healthcare environment, traditional BPM is not enough. We need tools that are simple and easy to use, yet flexible.
Clinician’s behavior can not always be mapped using rigid processes. We need modern tools enabling ad-hoc tasks to be generated, dynamic processes to be modelled, simple collaboration between care providers and care recipients and analytics to measure and report on outcomes.”
ECM and BPM are traditionally two very distinct things. When we embarked on this journey we had a very clear vision to select the best tools for the job. This meant we wanted the best ECM product and the best BPM product from the best vendor in each space. We performed two separate and distinct evaluation exercises and I fully expected to be working with two products from different vendors. But midway through our journey it became clear that Alfresco offered something unique that didn’t exist anywhere else on the market. Yes, they have two separate products – Alfresco One for ECM and Alfresco Activiti for BPM, but in combination what they have created is something greater than the sum of its parts and so unique that I don’t really recognise it as either ECM or BPM. In fact, these terms describe something that I don’t really relate with. When I see the words ECM and (especially) BPM I think complex, heavy-weight, closed. Stale. Alfresco have created something different – something simple, something light-weight, something open. Something fresh. I don’t know what the term is to describe this. It’s not ECM and its not BPM, but its definitely the future.
From the Axway website:
“Axway ProcessManager Key Capabilities
Use the BPMN-based graphical modeling environment to design processes and specify attributes
ProcessManager’s graphical modeling environment is based on the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) 1.1 standard, which allows business analysts to represent business process logic and patterns by drawing a diagram.
Business analysts can then specify the attributes for the process objects, such as:
- Relevant communication service (e.g., OFTP 2) for an incoming order
- Back-end integration service for processing the order in the ERP system
- Transformation service for converting the file (e.g., EDIFACT or XML)
- Routing mechanism
The modeled process can then be tested and refined before it is put into production.”
And from BPM Visibility Paves the Road to Operational Excellence:
“Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) are extremely powerful, as they allow process automation and offer visibility on how an organization performs in its overall value creation network.
In fact, BPMSs can also provide visibility without automating anything, simply by consolidating flows of events. For instance, probes can be used to fetch information from legacy applications and generate events, which are consolidated by a BPMS providing visibility on parts of process instances about which one has very little information. Another important usage of non-automated processes is the control of events coming from business partners, ensuring that every collaboration’s participant provides the appropriate information at the right time (and in the right format) as defined per the service level agreement.
BPMSs make many aspects visible, most notably these two: the proper state of process instances and the different variables associated with each step, such as its cost or completion time. Hence, BPMSs can help predict the future state of an organization based on its current situation. For instance, BPMSs can help identify a potential bottleneck before it arises, and can easily correct it through something called “dynamic resource re-affectation.” BPMSs can also provide real-time visibility on specific customer cases and answer important questions (e.g., “Where is my order?”), ease human work and interactions, and identify who is responsible for what and who did what. A BPMS is simultaneously the rearview mirror allowing you to understand what happened, the windshield through which you view what is about to happen, and the steering wheel empowering you to modify and adapt your course of action.”
From a review of CareCloud:
“CareCloud has an innovative workflow engine and systems architecture”
“automatic notifications when anything takes place in your medical practice with a live feed. In real time you will know when charges are posted, when a patient checks in, or if an appointment gets rescheduled”
From the CareCloud website:
Accounts Receivable Best Practices: Automated Workflow Engine
By way of context, every year for the past 6 years I have searched every single HIMSS conference exhibitor website (1400+!) for “workflow engine” or “Business Process Management” (15% in 2016!). Health IT is gradually, but ever more quickly, moving from a purely data-centric orientation to a more balanced emphasis on both data and workflow. The primary area in which this trend manifests itself is in software architecture. The best known specific terms-of-art associated with workflow technology are workflow engine, workflow management, business process management, process orchestration, and process-aware (academia), to name a few. As workflow engines and BPM become better known in healthcare and health IT, the increasing presence of these phrases on health IT conference websites is but one harbinger of a much needed transition from data-only, to data-and-workflow, emphases.
Note, workflow tech diffusion into health IT is still a bit under the radar, so to speak. Other Health 2.0 sponsors likely leverage proprietary or third-party workflow engine and process-aware technology. It just isn’t on their website! This will also change, as the sterling qualities of workflow tech — automaticity, transparent, flexibility, and improvability — increasingly become valuable competitive marketing collateral.