A modelling framework to improve healthcare processes using Business Process Modelling: preliminary experimentation to an outpatient clinic

The adoption of Business Process Modelling (BPM) in healthcare applications is a practice that helps both employers and managers define the process flow, roles, and responsibilities. Furthermore, it is also a great tool to support process performance improvement. Process models that are present in the literature are focused on specific case studies, lacking some flexibility towards the application to different healthcare settings. These models also fail to provide clear best practices, that may lead to standardization. In the present work, a framework to improve the standardization and generalization of the healthcare process modelling stage is presented, and an example of application in the case of improving the patient flow of an oncology outpatient clinic is provided. Once the application field is chosen, the idea is to formalize a general model that can be extended using additional model blocks, depending on the challenges or variables that may be encountered in each hospital structure. The model blocks can be integrated directly into the main one and offer different solutions for each challenge. The modelling language used to help build process models is Business Process Modelling and Notation (BPMN). This language has become almost a standard in healthcare process modelling because it allows us to give a clear representation of the activities and the role of each resource. Moreover, by applying the framework it would be possible to simulate the behaviour of the system under the implementation of different solutions, achieving also a benchmark of performance.