Designing cooperative social applications in healthcare by means of socialbpm

Abstract

The appearance of the so-called first-generation of social tools such as blogs, wikis or CMS made possible for the Web to be used as an interaction arena for healthcare purposes. Currently, this interaction has been improved by means of different social networks such as PatientsLikeMe, HealthVault or Inspire, just to cite a few. The business world, not to be left behind, is rapidly catching up with this change in interpersonal communications, allowing third parties (clients, patients, colleagues, providers, etc) to participate in the process execution by performing social operations such as voting, commenting, ranking, sharing, following, inviting, etc. However, this integration is being done in an ad-hoc manner, not existing understandable notations to include social interactions in Business Process Modelling (BPM). Moreover, the user has to face several social applications to perform simple social tasks, i.e., scheduling a meeting and sharing a diagnostic must be done through different applications. While the former problem affects the design phase, the latter affects the execution phase. In this paper we present a case study in order to illustrate how the use of SocialBPM solves these problems, where SocialBPM denotes to the combination of social technologies and BPM. SocialBPM eases both, the cooperative design of social processes, and their cooperative execution.