Object-aware Process Support in Healthcare Information Systems: Requirements, Conceptual Framework and Examples

Abstract

The business processes to be supported by healthcare information systems are highly complex, producing and consuming a large amount of data. Besides, the execution of these processes requires a high degree of flexibility. Despite their widespread adoption in industry, however, traditional process management systems (PrMS) have not been broadly used in healthcare environments so far. One major reason for this drawback is the missing integration of business processes and business data in existing PrMS; i.e., business objects (e.g., medical orders, medical reports) are usually maintained in specific application systems, and are hence outside the control of the PrMS. As a consequence, most existing PrMS are unable to provide integrated access to business processes and business objects in case of unexpected events, which is crucial in the healthcare domain. In this context, the PHILharmonicFlows framework offers an innovative object-aware process management approach, which tightly integrates business objects, functions, and processes. In this paper, we apply this framework to model and control the processes in the context of a breast cancer diagnosis scenario. First, we present the modeling components of PHILharmonicFlows framework applied to this scenario. Second, we give insights into the operational semantics that governs the process execution in PHILharmonicFlows. Third, we discuss the lessons learned in this case study as well as requirements from the healthcare domain that can be effectively handled when using an object-aware process management system like PHILharmonicFlows. Overall, object-aware process support will allow for a new generation of healthcare information systems treating both data and processes as first class citizens.

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