A Practical Approach to Process Support in Health Information Systems

Abstract

This article describes the design of a generator tool for rapid application development. The generator tool is an integral part of a healthcare information system, and newly developed applications are embedded into the healthcare information system from the very beginning. The tool-generated applications are based on a document oriented user interaction paradigm. A significant feature is the support of intra- and interdepartmental clinical processes by means of providing document flow between different user groups. For flexible storage of newly developed applications, a generic EAV-type (Entity-Attribute-Value) database schema is used. Important aspects of a consequent implementation, like database representation of structured documents, document flow, versioning, and synchronization are presented. Applications generated by this approach are in routine use in more than 200 hospitals in Germany.

From Requirements via Colored Workflow Nets to an Implementation in Several Workflow Systems

“…From the literature, it can be deduced that workflow systems are not applicable to the healthcare domain [11,24]. The current generation of workflow systems adequately supports administrative and production workflows but they are less suited for healthcare processes which have more complex requirements [11].…”

Eighth Workshop and Tutorial on Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets and the CPN Tools, Aarhus, Denmark, October 22-24, 2007

“…So, a requirement is that support needs to be provided for the support of crossdepartmental healthcare processes which is stressed in [29,14,40]. Finally, a completely different requirement 17 is that autonomous, independently developed applications needs to be integrated which is risky, costly and time-consuming [28]. This paper uses the approach initially proposed in [7,24] where also an EUC and CWN have been used to go from an informal inscription of a real world process to an implementation of the same process in a certain workflow system.…”

“…In the second approach the web service is treated as the WSDL (Web Service Description Language [34]) description of a group of operations, which are invoked over a network using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol [33]) messages. These operations can be published with UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration [28]) in a register.…”

“…From literature, it can be derived that workflow systems are not applicable for the healthcare domain [10,28]. The current generation of workflow systems adequately supports administrative and production workflows but they are less adequate for healthcare processes which have more complex requirements [10].…”

Process mining in oncology: A literature review

“…Healthcare is characterized by highly complex and extremely flexible patient care processes (care pathways) and many autonomous, independently developed information systems [3], [4]. Process mining offers the opportunity to develop deeper understanding of this complexity and, if applied to cancer patient records, may help improve cancer care pathways and outcomes for cancer patients.…”