Workflow for healthcare: A methodology for realizing flexible medical treatment processes

Abstract

While workflow management technology is applied in many industrial domains to improve the operational efficiency of business process execution, its usage in the healthcare domain is limited. One possible cause is that healthcare processes are often considered to be more whimsical and less predictable than procedures found in industry. Extending previous work on workflow and flexibility patterns, this paper presents a methodology for realizing processes that possess the required degree of flexibility that makes them suitable for the healthcare domain. To demonstrate the methodology's feasibility, it is applied to the processes that are found in a Dutch outpatient clinic. Interestingly, the flexibility demands of the investigated processes match quite well with the capabilities of current workflow management technologies, further motivating their increased usage in the healthcare domain. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.