Most organizations see the BPM in healthcare practice as an IT lead effort geared towards increased automation and efficiency. On this post, we talk about why BPM is more than a process manager but a great integration platform.
There's hardly a healthcare IT project that involves a single system. Organizations look for BPM implementations to look for a "management" mechanism to bring order to chaos, unity to the disparity created by dozens of service professionals.
While a solution like IBM BPM (Business Process Manager) can perfectly fit the fill to the execution of any BPM Center of Excellence vision the tooling of IBM BPM has way more hidden gems than what initially catches the eye. Specifically "integration" gems.
Any healthcare IT practitioner knows that every process that is thought to traverse more than a single silo in the organization will have to deal with:
- Healthcare IT coding systems such as SNOMED CT, HL7 FHIR, LOINC, UCUM, ICD and CPT among others.
- A core EHR (Electronic Health Record) system with interaction via API or database.
- A core HIS (Hospital Information System) with integration via an API or database.
- A multitude of LIS (Laboratory Information System) with diverse mechanisms, like ASTM, HL7 v2.x, HL7 v3.x, or HL7 FHIR if you are fortunate.
Besides, the logic of the process will need to involve a particular type of decisions, from basic ones handled by in-process logic to advanced "decisions made of decisions" that would require an ODM (Operational Decision Management) system interaction.
Finally, to top it all off, your process would need to expose its logic to inputs received from, most probably, a mobile application and would indeed, need to return those results to the same application or a multitude of applications.
So, in essence, you have here a radiography for an integration nightmare full of complexity at every level. Fortunately even IBM Business Process Manager Express, the least expensive and less capable of all BPM versions, will help any development team faced with such a daunting task.
IBM BPM will act as a "rail" orchestrating all these interactions and handling the timing of each one with masterful visibility to the end user, something difficult to achieve with other middleware types of applications.
While by no means we are stating that BPM will replace a full integration engine like IBM Integration Bus, we certainly believe when a team faces multiple end-points and needs to develop logic, timing, and phasing between them, IBM BPM will be the perfect candidate for the task.
If you want to learn more of our work with BPM for healthcare applications or how to implement an IBM BPM infrastructure on IBM Bluemix with our Hybrid Cloud Express offering, please download one of our presentations or contact our team. We will be happy to have a conversation on how to solve a particular problem.
