Toward a Care Process Metamodel: For business intelligence healthcare monitoring solutions

Improving care processes in healthcare institutions relies on effectively monitoring and making timely decisions for improving patient experience. Business Intelligence solutions have proven to be effective for monitoring processes in other industries. However, healthcare organizations face three challenges for implementing Business Intelligence solutions that effectively monitor care processes. First, the great variation of processes in healthcare domain makes it difficult to model them. Second, there is a gap between abstract administrative indicators and fine-grained operation-level measures of healthcare processes. Finally, it is difficult to reuse the underlying healthcare processes used for other successful solutions. In this paper, we present a Care Process Metamodel geared towards modeling healthcare processes. This metamodel (a) provides a platform for creating uniform care processes, (b) enables hierarchical care processes for modeling of composite processes as well as bridging the gap between abstract performance indicators and operation-level measures of healthcare processes, and (c) facilitates reusing the processes and the data structures required for monitoring them. This metamodel thus addresses some of the challenges for implementing successful Business Intelligence care process monitoring solutions for healthcare organizations. We also demonstrate how the Care Process Metamodel-based processes fit into an architecture, where data collected about encounters of patients can be used by stakeholders for improving the process and its execution. We use samples of cardiac-related processes to illustrate our approach.