Business Process Model and Notation BPMN Healthcare Examples and Papers

[This post is part of a series I am writing as a HIMSS17 Social Media Ambassador (four years in a row!) in the run up to HIMSS17, in Orlando, February 19-23. Stop by and meet me at the first ever HIMSS Makerspace, booth 7785 in the Innovation Zone!]

  • BPMN May Shake Up Health IT and Lead to True Workflow Interoperability
  • Interoperable Healthcare Workflows: A Vision for the Industry (Notes From A Keynote)
  • Business Process Model and Notation BPMN Healthcare Examples and Papers

I’m attending the Object Management Group Healthcare Business Process Modeling Workshop (press release, registration) at the beautiful Loews Coronado Bay Resort, near San Diego today.

This post consolidates a large number of papers and examples of using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) in healthcare that I reviewed during preparation for the workshop. I’ve been advocating workflow technology in healthcare for over two decades (My Foreword and Chapter in Business Process Management in Healthcare, Second Edition). In fact, I may have been the first to discuss, at length, Business Process Management (BPM) based health IT systems, including Electronic Health Records (2004, EHR Workflow Management Systems: Essentials, History, Healthcare). BPMN is not the only workflow notation relevant to process-aware health IT systems. Nor do all workflow management systems rely on a formal notation at all. However, as awareness, understanding, and use of BPMN spreads in healthcare, workflow management system and business process management technology will also surely spread, which is a good thing.

Here is some information about the Healthcare Business Process Modeling Workshop.

“Experts from the medical field and business modeling will discuss how OMG’s business process modeling standard can streamline the portability of clinical processes and workflows that govern how protocols are followed and care is delivered in healthcare organizations. For example, the agenda includes:

  • The Usage of BPMN™ for Obamacare
  • Using BPMN to Operationalize Clinical Knowledge
  • Integrating Clinical Information Modeling with BPMN
  • Modeling the Cognitive Side of Care Processes. Case Study: The Treatment of Atrial Fibrillation
  • Modeling Cancer Treatment Processes in BPMN and HL7 FHIR®”

“Within the health segment today, provider organizations each have their clinical processes and workflows that govern how protocols are followed and care is delivered. One of the operational challenges in becoming a “learning” organization lies in the ability to adapt and evolve those processes to embrace emerging best clinical practice, and to perform continuous improvement based upon care delivery and care outcomes within your own institution. Further, the professional societies and colleges continue to evolve and mature their guidelines, and staying current with those means incorporating that medical knowledge into your care pathways.

In a landscape where clinical knowledge and medical workflows are often either embedded in electronic health record (EHR) systems, or manually configured at an institution or site level, accommodating these changes can be timely, difficult, or near impossible to realize. Moreover, these rules are often expressed in “geek speak” and not in a language that can be owned and managed by the clinical community.

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a non-healthcare-specific representation of business processes and workflows that has both broad adoption and a robust set of support tools. BPMN has enabled other vertical sectors to model these needs en route to creating reusable knowledge artifacts that could be shared and in fact interoperate across systems and organizations. Recent work in the industry have uncovered gaps in how BPMN should integrate with the healthcare workforce to support truly portable, patient centered processes. To put it in a different light, BPMN standards have helped define the baseline for What should get accomplished in any given health care process. The implementation of BPMN in healthcare is increasingly challenged by Who should be responsible for any given task.

This workshop is geared toward exploring the specific and unique needs of the clinical health landscape, investigating BPMN and the extended set of BPMN enhancement standards to determine the viability, coverage, and gaps when considering this approach for solving the healthcare challenges described above. Of particular interest is an exploration on how best to integrate BPMN with the healthcare workforce.”

Enjoy my research review preparing for the Healthcare BPMN Workshop! (By the way, there are lots of cool looking healthcare BPMN diagram examples!)

Not healthcare specific, but useful background…

Healthcare but not BPMN…


On Periscope!

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