BPM clears a path through workflow hurdles

BPM helps track patient care

The Imperial College of London’s Healthcare NHS Trust works with healthcare providers to help with the care of cardiovascular conditions and the treatment of complex aortic disease. The difficulty of treatment for both is further complicated by the unique conditions and “pathways to care” for each patient. Some might have started from an initial checkup at their doctor’s office, while others may have had symptoms for years. Some might have had no symptoms at all before a major cardiovascular incident, while others came from a variety of different healthcare histories.

“We had challenges keeping track of pathways of care,” says David Taylor, program lead, virtual worlds and medical media, Imperial College of London. “Each patient chooses each pathway himself.”

The more different the pathways, the more varied the recordkeeping for the patient’s treatment. Too often that information wasn’t available from one healthcare provider to the next. Taylor first recommended using a collaborative communication solution about three years ago because he saw that errors could be reduced significantly.

“There’s a long, involved process before anyone has [cardiovascular] surgery,” Taylor says. It can be six to nine months between the initial detection of a problem and any surgery, and involve several different providers in the process. All of the pertinent information about previous care must be available for the best surgical and post-surgical care, but that wasn’t possible with legacy record-keeping methods. Paper trails weren’t organized, and the probability of missing or misplaced information was high.

“I had been considering the use of collaboration software such as SharePoint when I learned about Activiti,” Taylor says. In late 2014, Taylor chose the Alfresco Activiti BPM solution.

Promotes participation

With Activiti, all information about a patient’s care is maintained in a secure, centralized system. A patient’s healthcare providers can add test details, notes and other information so that each provider has all of the latest information. “It’s unusual for clinicians to write down all of the steps of a procedure. This system encourages them to do that,” Taylor says.

Taylor continues, “I was quickly able to implement our own cloud-based version and use the BPMN editor to mode the care pathway. I believe this approach will work with any medical specialty and can be modified by clinical teams themselves to incorporate the specifics of their own practices, which often vary between individual consultants.”

The beta with Activiti will end soon, and Taylor hopes to expand use of the solution through other programs with which the college is involved.

The successes of Portugal Telecom and the Imperial College of London are just two examples of how companies are benefiting from BPM solutions and why the Consideration of Business Process Management Market Forecasts indicates that markets at $2.8 billion will reach $8.3 billion by 2019. Growth comes as process automation adapts more efficiently to collaboration between people and provides improved interactive functionality.