Improved compliance by BPM-driven workflow automation

Identifying Opportunities for Workflow Automation in Health Care: Lessons Learned from Other Industries

Background  Workflow automation, which involves identifying sequences of tasks that can be streamlined by using technology and modern computing, offers opportunities to address the United States health care system's challenges with quality, safety, and efficiency. Other industries have successfully implemented workflow automation to address these concerns, and lessons learned from those experiences may inform its application in health care.

Objective  Our aim was to identify and synthesize (1) current approaches in workflow automation across industries, (2) opportunities for applying workflow automation in health care, and (3) considerations for designing and implementing workflow automation that may be relevant to health care.

Methods  We conducted a targeted review of peer-reviewed and gray literature on automation approaches. We identified relevant databases and terms to conduct the searches across sources and reviewed abstracts to identify 123 relevant articles across 11 disciplines.

Results  Workflow automation is used across industries such as finance, manufacturing, and travel to increase efficiency, productivity, and quality. We found automation ranged from low to full automation, and this variation was associated with task and technology characteristics. The level of automation is linked to how well a task is defined, whether a task is repetitive, the degree of human intervention and decision-making required, and the sophistication of available technology. We found that identifying automation goals and assessing whether those goals were reached was critical, and ongoing monitoring and improvement would help to ensure successful automation.

Conclusion  Use of workflow automation in other industries can inform automating health care workflows by considering the critical role of people, process, and technology in design, testing, implementation, use, and ongoing monitoring of automated workflows. Insights gained from other industries will inform an interdisciplinary effort by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to outline priorities for advancing health care workflow automation.

Potential of Laboratory Execution Systems (LESs) to Simplify the Application of Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) in Laboratory Automation

Modern business process management (BPM) is increasingly interesting for laboratory automation. End-to-end workflow automation and improved top-level systems integration for information technology (IT) and automation systems are especially prominent objectives. With the ISO Standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.X, a system-independent and interdisciplinary accepted graphical process control notation is provided, allowing process analysis, while also being executable. The transfer of BPM solutions to structured laboratory automation places novel demands, for example, concerning the real-time-critical process and systems integration. The article discusses the potential of laboratory execution systems (LESs) for an easier implementation of the business process management system (BPMS) in hierarchical laboratory automation. In particular, complex application scenarios, including long process chains based on, for example, several distributed automation islands and mobile laboratory robots for a material transport, are difficult to handle in BPMSs. The presented approach deals with the displacement of workflow control tasks into life science specialized LESs, the reduction of numerous different interfaces between BPMSs and subsystems, and the simplification of complex process modelings. Thus, the integration effort for complex laboratory workflows can be significantly reduced for strictly structured automation solutions. An example application, consisting of a mixture of manual and automated subprocesses, is demonstrated by the presented BPMS-LES approach.