White Papers

Applying Workflow Systems to Healthcare: Results of a Survey

• Tags:
• scenario,
• workflow,
• tasks,
• providers

Overview From the time of the patient's initial visit to the PCP to the hospital testing, the referral process took 3.5 weeks, 3 visits to 3 providers, 5 phone calls, and 4 documents mailed. Obviously if the problem was urgent or required immediate attention, the process would have been expedited. I've presented this actual scenario not to comment on the efficiency of the medical group, because I feel this scenario is fairly typical. I documented the scenario to indicate that healthcare involves many detailed tasks and processes, and how these processes relate to a common outcome is workflow. Better processes lead to better quality, which results in better productivity. I believe there are many ways information technology can improve the healthcare delivery process through workflow and document management solutions. In implementing workflow tools immediate improvements occur in sharing information, eliminating wasteful paper processes, and improved teamwork (all areas of critical importance to healthcare providers).

In the documented scenario, the patient's basic administrative data from the PCP could easily have been faxed, emailed or transmitted through EDI (i.e., since these providers obviously accept the same insurance a standard document format could be used) for which the specialist could utilize for the exact same process for the hospital referral. Each provider's practice management system, with the basic patient data scanned in, could show various tasks which need to be completed within specified date range and would remind the relevant staff when a task was not completed. The proposed workflow system could easily be customized to mirror the actual work process used by the medical staff. The lists of board-certified specialists who are contracted with the HMO could easily be obtained from the HMO and loaded into a database for use by the MC coordinator who simply selects a town and specialty to lookup.

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