Title: Transforming sterile processing departments by service-oriented business process management

Authors: Xiaoyu Ma; Kai Yang

Addresses: Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Wayne State University, 4815 4th street, Detroit, MI 48201, USA ' Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Wayne State University, 4815 4th street, Detroit, MI 48201, USA

Abstract: One major cause that dramatically impacts patient safety is the use of unclean reusable medical equipment (RME), delivered from a sterile processing department (SPD). Unfortunately, current reprocessing practice is mostly driven by human labour and control, which is error-prone and inefficient. In this paper, business process management is proposed to support modelling, automating, monitoring, and analysing sterile reprocessing procedures. The main contributions are: 1) identifying the main factors in the current practice that compromise patient safety; 2) proposing a service-oriented business process modelling framework to publish, discover, reuse, and compose interoperable services for different purposes; 3) promoting healthcare workflow to control the execution status and identifying the key architectural requirements for a healthcare workflow system; 4) proposing a service-oriented architecture and validating it with our SPD workflow prototyping system, SPDFLOW. To our best knowledge, SPDFLOW is the first effort in exploring healthcare workflow technology in the SPD domain.

Keywords: healthcare workflows; business process management; BPM; radio frequency identification; RFID; sterile processing departments; SPD; reusable medical equipment; RME; patient safety; process modelling; automation; monitoring; service-oriented architecture; SOA; interoperable services; interoperability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2013.056960

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2013 Vol.6 No.3, pp.186 - 200

Published online: 31 Jul 2014 *

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