Process Oriented Information Systems Architectures in Healthcare

An important insight in business management during recent years is the awareness that organisations need to focus on the processes that create value for their customers. This is in order to see to that value is created as efficiently as possible and that unnecessary or redundant activity is avoided. As a consequence, the organisations’ IT support need to interact with business processes in a better way than is currently the case. Healthcare is by no means an exception, but also here there is a great need to concentrate on the processes for transparent communication between various actors and organisations, and between IT systems. Therefore, a new type of process oriented integration architectures has been developed by means of what may be referred to as process managers, which closely reflect the business processes. These are software devices that visualise the integration by means of graphical and easy to understand process models that also facilitate management and monitoring of the processes and their integration requirements. This paper discusses benefits and difficulties for healthcare of introducing an IS architecture based on process manager technology. The discussion is based on experiences from a project, in which a process manager is introduced to integrate IT systems over the patient process and involving several healthcare organisations. Results indicate that healthcare processes are indeed quite complex and involve much communication with various individuals and organisation. Particular problems are caused by communication across organisational borders due to e.g. security issues. However, process manager technology offers help in that it is able both to manage and monitor processes and to make communication with and between IT systems simpler and safer.