Workflow management systems: the healthcare technology of the future?

In recent years, healthcare institutions have had problems accessing and maintaining the large amounts of data they deal with. This paper identifies current approaches and technologies which relate to patient administration systems. It argues that, in the near future, WWW-based multimedia patient administration systems would become the norm for healthcare institutions. The development and acceptance of web-based multimedia patient administration systems is likely to aggravate the problem of healthcare institutions being flooded with large amounts of clinical data. A large amount of clinical procedures relating to patient management are repetitive and Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) can automate these repeated activities. We believe that the introduction of WFMS would enable healthcare institutions to face this challenge of transforming large amounts of medical data into contextually relevant clinical information. The central contention of this paper is that there is a dynamic connection between healthcare, workflow and internet technologies, which is being ignored. This paper further establishes that it is possible to build a virtual electronic health record database based on the client server architecture using current internet and object-oriented (OO) technologies.