Engineering a state monitoring service for real-time patient flow management

Abstract

Addressing wait times is a challenge for the healthcare system. It is difficult for hospitals to measure precisely wait times and root causes. To do so they need to process events from disparate sources in real-time to measure fine grained care states of the patients, providers, beds and other resources related to care processes. In this paper, we present a state monitoring service for patient flow management that has been prototyped with a Toronto area hospital to integrate events from RFID tracking, business process management (BPM) applications and legacy systems. The results show that BPM and RFID provide events in real-time, but on their own could not fully define all states in the care process. Our state monitoring service integrates BPM and RFID and infers new events that define all the states not handled by BPM and RFID.

Business Process Management for optimizing clinical processes: A systematic literature review

“…42,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] The third author (D.R) with a tiebreaking vote decided the inclusion of six of them in the final selection. 49,50,[54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70] (see Table 2). In Figure 2, a diagram of the selection procedure is described.…”

“…BPMS includes process execution engines that allow the total or partial automation of the processes and provides us with complete traceability and monitoring of the execution and the status of the tasks, of the time necessary to complete them, of the responsible person who made them and of the KPIs defined in each process. 55,56,58,61,62,64,65,67,70 Many of these studies have quantified the impact of the measures introduced through different KPIs, mainly the waiting times for access to different services or the number of available resources. 57,58,60,61,65,67,69,70 In addition, BPMS include an integration module that allows interoperating with other disparate health information systems, generally electronic health record systems.…”

“…55,56,58,61,62,64,65,67,70 Many of these studies have quantified the impact of the measures introduced through different KPIs, mainly the waiting times for access to different services or the number of available resources. 57,58,60,61,65,67,69,70 In addition, BPMS include an integration module that allows interoperating with other disparate health information systems, generally electronic health record systems. 55,56,58,61,62,64,65,67,70 In other cases, this BPMS behaved as decision support systems to help clinicians in decision making 58,61,62,64,70 along with additional functionalities such as satisfy security requirements in the healthcare domain.…”

“…57,58,60,61,65,67,69,70 In addition, BPMS include an integration module that allows interoperating with other disparate health information systems, generally electronic health record systems. 55,56,58,61,62,64,65,67,70 In other cases, this BPMS behaved as decision support systems to help clinicians in decision making 58,61,62,64,70 along with additional functionalities such as satisfy security requirements in the healthcare domain. 64 Table 3 quantifies the specific goals achieved in the selected papers.…”

Big Data in Healthcare – Defining the Digital Persona through User Contexts from the Micro to the Macro

“…Hospitals, for example, may use RFID-based location tracking of personnel, patients, and equipment. The vast volume of data generated by such tracking systems can be utilized for smart, real-time adaptations to patient flows and clinical pathways, e.g., in emergency departments [45]. Moreover, many clinical information systems such as EMR and CPOE systems capture a large amount of meta data about their use, e.g., for auditing purposes.…”