Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies, National Research Council, 00185 Rome, Italy.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Oct 18;19(20):13456. doi: 10.3390/ijerph192013456.
Business Process Management (BPM) has been increasingly used in recent years in the healthcare domain to analyze, optimize, harmonize and compare clinical and healthcare processes. The main aim of this methodology is to model the interactions between medical and organizational activities needed to deliver health services, measure their complexity, variability and deviations to improve the quality of care and its efficiency. Among the different tools, languages and notations developed in the decades, UML (Unified Modeling Language) represents a widely adopted technique to model, analyze and compare business processes in healthcare. We adopted its diagrams in the MOCHA project to compare the different ways of organizing, coordinating and delivering child care across 30 EU/EEA countries both from an organization and control-flow perspectives. This paper provides an overview of the main components used to represent the business process using UML diagrams, also highlighting how we customized them to capture the specificity of the healthcare domain taking into account that processes are reconstructed on the basis of country experts' responses to questionnaires. The benefits of the application of this methodology are demonstrated by providing examples of comparing different aspects of child care.
近年来，业务流程管理（BPM）在医疗保健领域得到了越来越多的应用，用于分析、优化、协调和比较临床和医疗保健流程。该方法的主要目的是对提供医疗服务所需的医疗和组织活动之间的交互进行建模，衡量其复杂性、可变性和偏差，以提高护理质量和效率。在几十年来开发的不同工具、语言和符号中，UML（统一建模语言）是一种广泛采用的技术，用于对医疗保健中的业务流程进行建模、分析和比较。我们在 MOCHA 项目中采用了它的图来从组织和控制流的角度比较 30 个欧盟/欧洲经济区国家组织、协调和提供儿童保育的不同方式。本文概述了使用 UML 图表示业务流程所使用的主要组件，还强调了我们如何对其进行自定义，以考虑到流程是根据国家专家对问卷的回答进行重建的，从而捕获医疗保健领域的特殊性。通过提供比较儿童保育不同方面的示例，展示了该方法的应用优势。
