Business Process Redesign in Healthcare: towards an Evidence-based Holistic Approach

The redesign of business processes has become the key challenge for many healthcare organizations. This paper argues that current main research streams fail to assist healthcare practitioners in facing this challenge. More specifically, the main research streams fail to support practitioners in developing process alternatives that drastically outperform the performance of current processes in terms of cost, time, quality and flexibility. Not surprisingly, highly intuitive methods have gained widespread use in practice. Although these intuitive methods may foster creativity, they are at high risk to lead to biased redesign choices, the negligence of interesting redesign options and redesign options that are not actionable. Hence, this paper concludes that there is still a high need for an evidence-based holistic approach that assists healthcare practitioners in redesigning their business processes in a more structured way.