Process Modelling and Management for Healthcare

Process modeling and process management are traversal disciplines which have earned more and more relevance over the last two decades. Several research areas are involved by these traversal disciplines: database systems, database management, and information systems; Enterprise Resource Planning and operations research; formal languages and logics, to mention just a few of them. Process modeling and process management have been covering many applications domains, ranging from the pure and typical business activities (eg , bank loan, insurance claim, and car rental to mention a few of them) which are more rigorous and strictly invariant from one case to another, to much more complex and variability-prone activities. Bank loan process instances are rigorously the same, no matter who is the applicant or the customer: so too insurance claim, car rental and many other process instances, whose execution schema is customer-invariant. On the other side, more complex domains, such as healthcare, are more affected by case-to-case variability and do not feature the same exact behaviors for all the cases: one patient may react in a completely different way from the ``other'' patients; emergency situations can arise at any time, and need to be managed as soon as possible; time-critical situations, ie, where the correctness of the reaction also depends on the time needed to react to the event, may occur at any stage. Thus, process modeling and management techniques need to be suitably customized, adapted -- and sometimes tamed, too -- when facing domains which show a very high level of variability from one case to another, or from one patient to another as in healthcare, or which show a time-critical behavior. This book aims at providing the reader with an in-depth analysis of what process modeling and process management techniques can do in healthcare, of the major challenges faced, and of those challenges still remaining to be faced. In order to cover these major topics, the book collects contributions from the major authors in the field of process modeling and management in healthcare.