α-Flow: A document-based approach to inter-institutional process support in healthcare

Abstract

Inter-institutional collaboration requires clean task boundaries and the separation of responsibilities. In addition, healthcare processes are intrinsically fluid. Traditional activity-oriented workflow models or content-oriented workflow models do not provide adequate support for the paper-based working practice in healthcare. The α-flow approach adopts electronic documents as the primary means of information ex-change, fusing both paradigms into a combined workflow schema model, wherein workflow schemas are represented as documents which are shared coequally to content documents. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.