Health care performance monitoring using an inpatient reference process model and clinical KPIs

Abstract

Health care processes are nowadays heavily dependent on Information Technology (IT). On the other side, assessing a higher quality of health care to patients has become increasingly important. Effective health care processes are thereby heavily dependent on a comprehensive IT-support. Therefore, a thorough understanding about both the hospital IT-systems and clinical pathways is required, to identify quality problems. Improving quality of care through process performance measurement in hospitals and the identification of bottlenecks in performed workflows is thereby a promising concept. On this account we propose a novel approach based on an inpatient reference process model aiming a standardized and automated retrieval of quality and performance metrics along the clinical pathways of time-critical diseases in the context of various clinical standards and systems. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.