Business Process Reengineering and Modelling in healthcare: a systematic literature review and research agenda

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has always been important in the industrial sector, being processes improvement the basis of quality management systems. BPR can also be applied to other sectors outside the industry, including those offering services. In recent years, the healthcare sector is more welcoming towards adopting reengineering practices to improve the existing processes performances. Healthcare processes are in fact quite complex, so the application of techniques that can lead to improve their efficiency through cost reduction, workforce, and resource utilization has a great managerial implication. In this paper a systematic literature review of the existing modelling and reengineering approaches of healthcare processes has been conducted. The results from the literature review give evidence of the modelling challenges that are encountered in this field, and of the techniques that are typically utilized. Based on these results, a research agenda is proposed that highlights which topics and methodologies can be the focus of future research. In particular, we think that the formalization of generalized models that have been successfully tested on real cases is essential to form a shared knowledge base that can serve as a reference and become a benchmark for various application contexts.