Department of Business & ICT, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
J Biomed Inform. 2011 Dec;44(6):1039-55. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2011.08.007. Epub 2011 Aug 17.
In the healthcare domain, human collaboration processes (HCPs), which consist of interactions between healthcare workers from different (para)medical disciplines and departments, are of growing importance as healthcare delivery becomes increasingly integrated. Existing workflow-based process modelling tools for healthcare process management, which are the most commonly applied, are not suited for healthcare HCPs mainly due to their focus on the definition of task sequences instead of the graphical description of human interactions. This paper uses a case study of a healthcare HCP at a Dutch academic hospital to evaluate a novel interaction-centric process modelling method. The HCP under study is the care pathway performed by the head and neck oncology team. The evaluation results show that the method brings innovative, effective, and useful features. First, it collects and formalizes the tacit domain knowledge of the interviewed healthcare workers in individual interaction diagrams. Second, the method automatically integrates these local diagrams into a single global interaction diagram that reflects the consolidated domain knowledge. Third, the case study illustrates how the method utilizes a graphical modelling language for effective tree-based description of interactions, their composition and routing relations, and their roles. A process analysis of the global interaction diagram is shown to identify HCP improvement opportunities. The proposed interaction-centric method has wider applicability since interactions are the core of most multidisciplinary patient-care processes. A discussion argues that, although (multidisciplinary) collaboration is in many cases not optimal in the healthcare domain, it is increasingly considered a necessity to improve integration, continuity, and quality of care. The proposed method is helpful to describe, analyze, and improve the functioning of healthcare collaboration.
在医疗保健领域，人类协作流程（HCP）变得越来越重要，这些流程由来自不同（辅助）医学学科和部门的医疗工作者之间的交互组成，随着医疗保健服务的日益整合，这些流程变得越来越重要。现有的基于工作流的医疗流程管理流程建模工具是最常用的，但并不适合医疗保健 HCP，主要是因为它们侧重于任务序列的定义，而不是人类交互的图形描述。本文使用荷兰一家学术医院的医疗保健 HCP 案例研究来评估一种新的以交互为中心的流程建模方法。所研究的 HCP 是头颈肿瘤团队执行的护理路径。评估结果表明，该方法带来了创新、有效和有用的功能。首先，它收集和形式化了接受采访的医疗保健工作者在各个交互图中的隐性领域知识。其次，该方法自动将这些本地图集成到一个单一的全局交互图中，反映了整合的领域知识。第三，案例研究说明了该方法如何利用图形建模语言有效地描述交互、它们的组合和路由关系以及它们的角色。对全局交互图的流程分析表明存在 HCP 改进机会。所提出的以交互为中心的方法具有更广泛的适用性，因为交互是大多数多学科患者护理流程的核心。讨论认为，尽管（多学科）协作在医疗保健领域的许多情况下不是最优的，但它越来越被认为是提高整合、连续性和护理质量的必要条件。所提出的方法有助于描述、分析和改进医疗保健协作的运作。
