By Ken Rubin, BPM+ Health
BPM+ Health had the good fortune of participating in a distinguished panel as part of the European Federation of Medical Informatics (EFMI) as part of the Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) event in May. We joined the session entitled, "Workshop Designing, modeling and implementing health ecosystems in transformation.” The session explored the use of architectural models to represent complex healthcare systems and the necessary interactions among Business, Enterprise, Information, Computational, Engineering, and Technology perspectives in describing, documenting, and designing HIT solutions.
With BPM+, formalisms are a means of documenting enterprise needs, allowing for a precise representation of business workflows and high-level interactions between people and systems, framing the downstream needs and requirements to shape and realize solutions. The session identified tasks and tools, each with a particular focus but needed to address the broad landscape and workflow required to move from business interactions to data representation to technical design to underlying platforms.
Overall in my view, the value of the session came through in three fundamental themes. First, vertical problems are often viewed as narrow and isolated, which is not pragmatic or realistic. The reality is that all of these disciplines and needs intertwine and that an organizing framework (based upon an architecture) is essential for threading those needs together to realize value.
Secondly, the implementation and execution of successful complex systems require recognizing the interplay and co-dependency among these varied approaches. Business pressures and needs affect the processes undertaken, shaping information requirements and constraints and affecting technologies and solutions. Traceability among these factors is essential, resulting in an understanding of the context of each concerning the broader whole and fostering reuse.
Finally, we cannot realize viable healthcare solutions with any standard or approach but rather in their collective use to complement one another, forming a rich tapestry of solutions. Thus, force-fitting one technology or standard to solve the spectrum is the wrong answer. Instead, we must seek to understand how pieces fit and to use each piece for its strengths and acknowledge (and ultimately address) the gaps identified to support the success of learning health systems.
Papers have been published by EFMI in the 2021 edition of Public Health and Informatics Proceedings of MIE 2021, in both softcopy and IOS Press. (Please visit https://ebooks.iospress.nl/ISBN/978-1-64368-185-6.)
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