The research initiative PERIKLES, jointly undertaken by GECKO mbH and its partners, introduces Business Process Management (BPM) information technology into core value-adding clinical processes that are resource-intensive and coordination-centric. This fundamental BPM approach is further enhanced and supported by scheduling functionalies, data integration capabilities, context-awareness, and auto identification sensor technology.
The project’s name is an acronym and stands for “Support of perioperative clinical processes by cooperating flexible workflows and auto ID sensor systems”. From a business perpective, complex, yet well structured workflows of operating hospitals are at center stage of the research initiative.
The project has been financially supported by the German Federal Ministory of Education and Research (BMBF). By the end of the funding period, in April 2011, a clinically deployed prototype implementation has become available that has succesfully demonstrated the intended key functionalities.
For further information, please also refer to the project’s website www.perikles.org.
For research papers and conference contributions, see, e.g.:
“Workflow Support for Scheduling in Surgical Care Processes”, ECIS, Helsinki (2011)
The diagram shows an example of a solution that has been realized as part of PERIKLES and also been implemented in the central operating facility of a German partner hospital.
The system is based on the powerful process-aware information system YAWL (www.yawlfoundation.org) to support the execution of workflow cases (1) of individual patients.
It also integrates with a special ultrasound-based realtime locating system (RTLS) of the Norwegian company Sonitor (www.sonitor.com) to automatically determine the position of patients (2) and devices at the room level.
The workflow is made up of individual tasks (3) such as “schedule procedure”, “admit to hospital”, and “enter operating room”.
In the course of this process, an active battery-powered tag is attached to the patient. To this end, a nurse, by means of a software running on top of a mobile clinical assistant (MCA) (4), maps the patient’s unique case number to the tag identification number. The tag is essential for the unambiguous detection of each process step until the end of the surgical procedure.
After being tagged, the patient undergoes the process steps “transfer patient” (i.e., to the operating facility), “lock in” (i.e., into the clean area), “induce anesthesia” and so forth. Each single workflow step is accompanied by a characteristic event that is either recognized by an ultrasonic sensor device (5) or manually entered in a dialog-free, context-sensitive way. By means of specially designed software system (6) the detected events are then correlated with the underlying workflow specification and forwarded to the process monitor (7).This results in a realtime visualisation of all presently enabled concurrent patient processes in the operating facility.
The thus facilitated process automation and process transparency generally increases the workflow quality and improves the inter-professional communication amoung the stakeholders. Furthermore, it serves to enhance the patient’s safety and is therefore in his or her own interest.
