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Making the Case for Better Healthcare Through Event-Driven Processes and Effective Data Management by Amy Larsen DeCarlo
The interaction between clinician and patient drives all treatment results—good (full recovery), bad (mortality), or indifferent (continuing morbidity). There is little margin for error, yet achieving improvements in medical outcomes and healthcare efficiency is no easy task. Beyond the complex clinical activities (history-taking, physical examination, diagnostics, and treatment), the healthcare delivery process involves many and diverse medical personnel, resources, and services. Worldwide, health and healthcare are complicated by multiple factors: travel and trade facilitate the spread of disease, access to and quality of healthcare varies by geography and economic class, and medical professionals carry ever-higher caseloads. In the United States, the healthcare system has reached a potentially catastrophic tipping point as skyrocketing costs and accessibility (or more correctly the lack thereof) threaten the health and wellness of large segments of the population. Factor in the accelerating growth of the body of medical knowledge, and the challenge to improve efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare becomes even more daunting. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United States spent more by far per person on healthcare in 1997 than any other nation: $7,290 per capita on healthcare versus $4,763 in Norway (the next highest spender). However, greater spending has not produced better results. The United States ranks 37th in overall health system performance, according to the World Health Organization; and 15th in deaths from preventable illnesses. One promising solution to the healthcare cost-effectiveness problem is to provide complete, accurate and timely information at the point of care using state-of-the-art information technology (IT). The IT industry can offer tools to manage and share the data, at phenomenal volumes and speeds. Sophisticated diagnostic tools, high-speed computer networks, and mobile devices already help to ensure favorable treatment outcomes and to improve care delivery efficiency on a case-by-case basis. More extensive instrumentation, interconnectivity, and intelligence in the management of medical data and information would markedly improve the efficacy of examination, diagnosis, and treatment at the point of care. How to aggregate all of these information resources and technologies to streamline patient care and improve outcomes is a challenge, particularly because many typically isolated points of care exist in a very fluid and vast healthcare ecosystem. The IT resolution of this issue lies with business process improvement and the better management of information in the forms of business process management (BPM), business event processing (BEP), and business intelligence (BI). (Truly effective healthcare BI, also known as "health analytics," involves automatically initiated mining and near real-time analysis of information resources, enabled by event-driven BPM.) This aggregation, now being referred to in the literature as event-driven business process management (edBPM), provides the capability to monitor events in real-time, in order to determine "when" actions should occur based upon predetermined logic for event occurrence and condition testing. A "when" condition having been determined, BEP can inform BPM in order to determine "what" IT- or content-centric process action to take (e.g., initiate a BI analysis, review and update an electronic form) or to notify the appropriate agent identified in a human-centric process (e.g., page a physician or nurse for "Code Blue" to staff a heart attack "crash cart" in a particular patient’s hospital room). edBPM can be used through intra- and inter-enterprise environments (within a hospital or throughout a geographic region, for example) to detect patterns (such as incidence of illness perhaps indicative of pandemic occurrence) and to adjust process activities and agents to respond more quickly or even proactively to changing conditions.
Given the number and diversity of participants and stakeholders, as well the complexity of the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem, implementing these state-of-the-art IT methods and tools is not a simple matter. The fact that these tools and techniques are being used both within and outside the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem today bodes well for ultimate success, however, few IT providers have the technology and process expertise to provide real help to healthcare organizations in implementing BPM, BEP, and BI. Through its WebSphere and Information Management product lines, IBM delivers the solutions that the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem needs to set critical improvements in motion. IBM WebSphere BPM enabled by Smart SOA™ and WebSphere Business Events provides healthcare organizations with the tools they need to model, assemble, deploy, and monitor processes, as well as to correlate events and continually refine their business processes. InfoSphere Clinical Analytics (ICA) calculates and benchmarks financial and clinical productivity, supplying actionable analytics that healthcare institutions can use to improve outcomes, mine for more information, and meet regulatory requirements. IBM also offers expertise and a deep vertical knowledge base in the healthcare industry to help organizations plan, deploy, and execute crucial process improvements. For the healthcare and life sciences industry, the time to act is now. Organizations that move aggressively to implement the IT technologies of BPM, BEP, and BI in an interoperable manner can achieve cost-effective results and improve interactions and outcomes at the point of care. Near-term and positive results are critical. Simply put, there is no room for failure. Back to homepage »
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Archive of Articles by Amy Larsen DeCarlo