Clinical Engineering Use of Event-Driven Process Chain (EPC) to Develop Enterprise Models of Collaborative Information and Workflow for Re-Engineering the Operating Room

The healthcare industry is the largest industry in the US, and costs are growing rapidly. There is also an increase in waste, medical errors and patient injuries. One central problem is that hospitals have compartmentalized and disaggregated business models in which clinical specialists duplicate information. An international project called Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is underway to develop consistent information enterprise architectures for hospitals. The Operating Room (OR) is one of the most complex parts of the hospital, involving many other departments like laboratory, radiology, pathology, pharmacy, anesthesiology and billing, so a formal IHE design for the OR has not yet begun. This current research describes a collaborative workflow model for the OR using Event-Driven Process Chains, a popular and successful process reengineering tool used in ERP systems engineering.