Other books in this series...
* Introduction to BPM and Workflow (published May 2010)
* Academic
* Financial
* Government
* Healthcare (published June 2010)
* Industry
* Transport
* Utilities

Length:115 pages
Size: 4MB

BPM and Workflow in Healthcare

This eBook is free when you buy the 2007 BPM and Workflow Handbook: Spotlight on Healthcare.

This new eBook presents the collection of best and most important chapters on this topic recently published in the annual BPM and Workflow Handbook series, Excellence in Practice series and our other publications. BPM’s promises are real, but the path to success is littered with pitfalls and shortcuts to failure. Best practices can help you avoid them. If you are just embarking on using its methods and tools, these authors have a wealth of experience to learn from and build on. Whether you are a business manager or an Information Technology practitioner, this special collection of papers will provide valuable information about what BPM can do for you—and how to apply it.

Workflow Opportunities and Challenges in Healthcare
Jonathan Emanuele and Laura Koetter, Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., USA

Workflow technology has expanded substantially into the healthcare industry over the last year. Hospitals are embracing this technology as a means to improve operational efficiency, achieve patient safety goals and positively influence the quality of care. This paper will explore the opportunities BPM and workflow technology have to make a profound impact on patient care while examining the challenges that are present in the healthcare arena.

Transforming Healthcare through Enterprise Architecture and BPM
Christine Robinson, CSC, USA

Health Care is one of President Obama’s top priorities for the nation according to his 2009 State of the Union Speech and many other statements he and others have made. This area demands radical change to increase the accessibility and affordability of health care, find new cures for disease (especially a cure for cancer), assure privacy of patient data, lessen health care’s draining effects on our economy, cut waste and fraud in Medicaid and Medicare, have greater participation in global health initiatives, accelerate health care’s role in Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Recovery, and facilitate information sharing environments between organizations. These are some of the major objectives the United States must fulfil to improve our lives as individuals, as a nation, and as members of the global community. This calls for new ways of providing health care across the nation and beyond. With the frameworks and models already in place today, we can achieve profound improvements through adopting an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach empowered by Business Process Management (BPM) and enabling technologies toward improving affordability and accessibility of health care while protecting the privacy of patient data.

Authenticated Document / Data Exchange in Healthcare
Dr. Mohammed Shaikh, Image X Inc., USA

Exchange of documents and data in commercial organizations is normally accomplished using traditional workflow methodologies. Successful implementation of workflow in these organizations is encouraging agencies that did not look at these workflow methodologies favorably because data and documents exchanged were considered confidential and restricted and for use only by authorized users. The workflow in these organizations requires that user be authenticated before accessing the document/data as well as obtain their signatures at each step due to legal requirements associated with these processes. In addition retaining the confidentiality of the document/data based on user authentication is of utmost concern. Recent advances in digital signature technology and its use in replacing traditional signature have opened the possibility of creating a successful document/data exchange workflow for authenticated documents and data. Further this approach could be extended to authenticate each user and their role to meet confidentiality and security requirement.

Business Process Management in Pharmaceutical R&D
Dr. Kai A. Simon, ALTANA Pharma AG — a Nycomed company, Germany

Although highly profitable, the pharmaceutical industry has been facing increasing development cost, price pressure, and regulatory requirements. In this context, many companies have embarked on BPM initiatives to manage efficiency and compliance. This article provides an introduction to BPM in the pharmaceutical industry on the basis of a short case study in clinical Research and Development (R&D).

Case Studies

The Chester County Hospital

The healthcare industry has been slower to adopt Business Process Management (BPM) than other industries. However, The Chester County Hospital (CCH) has distinguished itself by not only implementing workflow management technology in a healthcare setting, but by customizing and supplementing that technology with its own home-grown applications. The result is a workflow system that integrates clinical, operational and financial processes to support patient-centered care. In addition to meeting the primary goal of providing safer, more efficient care to patients, BPM has enabled CCH to improve working conditions for employees, dramatically increase productivity, achieve higher levels of cost optimization, and become a competitive force to reckon with in the local healthcare community.

Geisinger Health System, USA

In a move to improve document management and bring greater efficiency to clinical, business and financial processes across its organization, Geisinger Health System undertook a cross-enterprise BPM initiative that has resulted in significant productivity improvements, cost savings and improved customer service. Benefits have included automated document retrieval, faster response on billing and claims inquiries and greatly reduced turnaround time on accounts payable processes with resulting cost savings of $1.5 million+ annually.

PruHealth, South Africa

PruHealth is a leading health insurance company which rewards members for adopting a healthy lifestyle. Launched in October 2004, PruHealth is a joint venture between Prudential and Discovery, the South African health insurance leader. Its model is based on a successful concept launched in South Africa. Prudential is a leading financial services company founded in 1848 with over 21 million customers and 28,000 employees worldwide.
PruHealth is using a business process management approach on top of a service oriented architecture to create a more agile IT infrastructure – one that enables them to adapt their processes to business opportunities and bring products to market more quickly in the highly competitive health insurance market in the UK. PruHealth acquired the BPMS software in August 2007 and had already started to deploy processes on a service-oriented architecture by April 2008, a significant achievement in a short space of time. PruHealth’s IT team and back office and systems support is located in Johannesburg, South Africa.

IMAN Australian Health Plans Australia

Australian Health Plans, a division of IMAN International Pty Ltd is a specialist provider of health plans for temporary residents working in Australia. Since 1981, the IMAN group has specialized in this niche market for health plans. In 2004 IMAN had a problem; as their sales grew, their costs grew in proportion. Considering this, they made a strategic decision to embark on an IT improvement strategy based on implementing Open Source technology via their IT software partners Polonious Pty Ltd. Their main objective was being to control operating costs and stop costs increasing with sales as far as possible.
A side benefit of this approach has been to reduce the external systems to near zero and provide a single point of reference for all information pertaining to claims and plans within the core system. The approach has improved IMAN business processes so that their cost structure is now well below the industry average.

Chemcentral Corporation, USA

Acting on a newly implemented operating strategy designed to expand and enhance its customer and market focus, CHEMCENTRAL, a leading global chemical distributor, recently put into operation a new private network-based workflow solution to automate document distribution to and from its trading partners and customers. The service, offered by ADEXS Inc., is being utilized as a means to reduce internal document processing costs, enhance customer service and improve response time to customer requests for quality control/conformance documents such as Certificates of Analysis (COAs) and OSHA-regulated compliance documents such as Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs).

NAS Medicare Project, USA

University Hospital Virgen Rocio, Spain

Document management is one of the major points of inefficiency in hospitals. Due to the great amount of medical reports that are generated for each patient, and the importance of said reports for the continuity of the patient's care, it’s indispensable for the improvement in the generation and management of clinical reports.
This work presents the introduction of speech recognition technology for clinical reports in a healthcare organization in Andalusia (Spain). This technology facilitates a quicker and more secure way for health care professionals to complete patient's reports. The new process reduces possible mistakes in the reports and offers better management of hospital resources. We have used methodology based on Business Process Management to guide the implementation of this speech recognition system.

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