Business Process Management techniques for health services: Experiences and Application

Abstract

In this paper, we present our experience in a Business Process Management (BPM) project for public hospitals. This project is supported by a research network whose overall goal is to develop new health services based on telemedicine. In order to do so, different decisionsupport and planning methodologies and tools are supported in order to produce new organizational models for efficiently support health services. Among these, we focus on the process-oriented approach rather than the traditional function-oriented approach to health services. According to this approach, health processes must first be identified and modeled in order to simulate the resulting models and seek for alternatives in a BPM context. Since it is more than likely that the new processes to be implemented may imply the redesign of (at least) part of the current information and communication system, a formal description model suitable for software development (i.e. UML diagrams) should also be produced