Study Of Workflow-Aware Healthcare Information System

Along with the development of medicine and technology, medical processes have become more and more complex and there has been a growing demand for process monitoring and management. Thus, workflow has become a problem needed to be addressed urgently for the further development of the healthcare information system. In traditional healthcare information system, the medical processes are hard-coded in the applications, thus the processes can't be dynamically adjusted to perform the workflow reengineering and optimization, and the system can't provide sufficient data for workflow monitoring and management as well. Workflow technology has been developed for many years and widely used in many areas, such as commercial, banking, business, etc. To be workflow-aware must be one of the main features in the next-generation healthcare information system.However, the application of workflow technology in medical area is limited because of the complexity and flexibility of medical workflow, thus how to model the medical workflow is the key issue for workflow-aware healthcare information system. In addition, system integration is the essential problem in the heterogeneous medical environment and is often carried out through data communication based on medical communication standards (such as DICOM, HL7) and IHE profile. How to integrate equipments and systems compatible with data communication standards and IHE profile is an important challenge for workflow-aware healthcare information system.In order to provide a research base for the theoretical system of workflow-aware healthcare information system, this thesis has analyzed in detail the characteristics of the workflow technology and the healthcare information system in terms of above-mentioned problems and challenges, made in-depth study on medical workflow modeling method and the system architecture of the workflow-aware healthcare information systems. Specifically:A comprehensive analysis of workflow technology is made to provide a foundation for study on workflow-aware healthcare information system, including the concepts in workflow technology, the methodologies of how to define, implement, manage, and optimize the processes using workflow technology as well as the approaches to the handling of flexible and exceptional processes.Based on the analysis of medical workflow characteristics, a three-layer medical workflow model, which contains a root model, a sub-model library and a data communication process model library, is proposed to support the common process, flexible and exceptional processes and data communication processes. It also provides a workflow model expression methodology for workflow-aware healthcare information system.A medical workflow modeling method based on IHE is proposed. Taking YAWL as the modeling language, the method generates the above-mentioned three-layer medical workflow model through mapping IHE to YAWL.Based on the detailed analysis of the architectures of healthcare information system, a workflow-aware healthcare information system architecture, taking medical workflow bus as the backbone, is proposed to realize the separation of the processes and applications. A process-driven data communication mechanism and a data-driven process control mechanism are designed, thus system integration between workflow-aware healthcare information system and heterogeneous equipments and systems can be achieved.Based on above modeling method and architecture, a workflow-aware radiology information system is designed and implemented in accordance with four phases of workflow life cycle to verify the modeling method based on IHE and the system architecture of workflow-aware healthcare information system provided in this thesis. The results show the effectiveness and correctness of the methods and technology infrastructures provided in this thesis and they will establish the theoretical foundation for the design, development and implementation of workflow-aware healthcare information system.