Clinical processes from various angles - amplifying BPMN for integrated hospital management

Abstract

The design and management of information systems is driven by model-oriented approaches on different levels of abstraction. For instance, enterprise models link the organizational action system and corresponding information systems. Enterprise models are generally perceived as measures to close the gap between business and IT, as it is in the healthcare domain. Clinical Pathways (CPs) represent value-added processes of hospitals and are typically described by respective process modeling languages like BPMN. However, a solitary focus on processes is insufficient for utilizing the potential of the model. Instead, it is rather advisable to consider various perspectives in order to completely represent the organizational action system of a hospital. We therefore propose to extend clinical process models with accordingly required perspectives for the representation of satellite objects, e.g. medical resources. Based on previous work, this paper motivates the approach of (process-based) integrated hospital modeling and presents the architecture and design of a revised BPMN extension for multi-perspective modeling. The applicability of the proposed BPMN extension is demonstrated by modeling a CP part for the treatment of stroke patients, which explicitly integrates the process and resource perspective.