Process-Oriented Integration and Coordination of Healthcare Services across Organizational Boundaries

TELLO LEAL, EDGAR; DAVID VILLARREAL, PABLO; CHIOTTI, OMAR

JOURNAL OF MEDICAL SYSTEMS

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2012 vol. 36 p. 3713 - 3724

0148-5598

To achieve an integration and coordination healthcare services among organizations through inter-organizational processes to enable organizations to provide high quality healthcare integrated services and continuous process improvements, this paper proposes a methodology that follows a top-down approach based on a Model-Driven Architecture. It provides a modeling language that enables organizations conceptualizing an integration agreement, and identifying and designing cross-organizational process models. These models are used for the automatic generation of: process models representing the private view each organization requires to perform the role it fulfills in cross-organizational processes, and Colored Petri Net (CP-Net) specifications to implement these processes. A multi-agent system platform provides agents that interpret CP-Nets and enable the communication between the Healthcare Information Systems of the organizations for executing the cross-organizational processes. Clinical documents are defined using the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture. This methodology guarantees that important requirements for healthcare services integration and coordination are fulfilled: interoperability between heterogeneous Healthcare Information Systems; ability to cope with changes in cross-organizational processes; guarantee of alignment between the integrated healthcare service solution defined at the organizational level and the solution defined at technological level; and the distributed execution of cross-organizational processes keeping the organizations autonomy.