Modeling clinical workflows using business process modeling notation

Abstract

We present a semantic interoperability framework to represent Clinical Pathways (CP) as business process workflows represented using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). We take a knowledge management approach whereby we represent CP as a CP ontology. To represent a CP as a process workflow we have developed a high-level semantic mapping between the CP ontology and the BPMN ontology. The ontology mapping allows the alignment of semantic relations between two ontologies and thus ensures that a clinical process defined in the CP ontology is mapped to a standard BPMN workflow element.

An integrated framework for verifying multiple care pathways

“…Although none of these languages has been proven to be perfectly compatible with clinical pathway process modelling, BPMN is regarded as a promising notation amongst process-oriented modelling languages. Hashemian and Abidi analysed various techniques and picked out the main features in a comparison of BPMN with other approaches [12]. Reasons why BPMN attracts attention include its broad acceptance within research and industry, compatibility with various process modelling tools, expressiveness, and simple notation [12,5].…”

“…Hashemian and Abidi analysed various techniques and picked out the main features in a comparison of BPMN with other approaches [12]. Reasons why BPMN attracts attention include its broad acceptance within research and industry, compatibility with various process modelling tools, expressiveness, and simple notation [12,5]. Thus, it is natural to interface with this format and its intended semantics.…”

“…We follow [12], where ontologies (representing entities, their properties and mutual relationships) are established for both BPMN and clinical pathways. A CP ontology describes a number of specific constructs including branching by a decision, branching for multiple concurrent treatments, activity flows, and so on, as follows.…”

“…This is used to provide data description on each element. In [12], Property is defined just to deliver or store any generic additional data; even though BPMN provides the possibility of specifying name, type and value of variables in Property, we need to describe logical and arithmetic general formulas to be passed to the SMT solver. To this end, we chose to store such information in the Documentation field, specifying a format for the possible entries, and handling all the details to interface the final user with the back-end: for example, converting the user-friendly infix notation with the Polish notation used in SMT-LIB.…”

Simple Modeling of Executable Role-Based Workflows: An Application in the Healthcare Domain

“…They have been used since the 1980s and today are implemented in many hospitals, as there is evidence that they lead to substantial improvements (Ronellenfitsch et al, 2008;Rotter et al, 2010). Because of the workflow-like nature of many CPs they have meanwhile been identified as very promising starting points for the application of workflow modeling, independent of the actual modeling languagebe it BPMN (Grosskopf et al, 2010;Hashemian & Abidi, 2012;Scheuerlein et al, 2012) or even UML activity diagrams (Daniyal & Abidi, 2010;Mauro et al, 2010). Obviously, the existence of defined CPs means great potential for savings both in time and overall effort regarding the creation of workflow models, because the longsome identification of task sequences can be carried out more efficiently.…”