Process Execution and Enactment in Medical Environments

Process models are increasingly recognized as an important asset for higher-quality healthcare. They may be used for analyzing, documenting, and explaining complex medical processes to the stakeholders involved in the process. Models may also be used for driving single processes or for orchestrating multiple ones. Model-driven software technologies therefore appear promising. In particular, process enactment provides software-based support for executing operational processes. A wide variety of possible enactment schemes are available in medical environments, e.g., to maintain daily medical worklists, to issue warnings or reminders in specific process states, to schedule tasks competing for resources, to provide on-the-fly advice in case of staff unavailability, and so forth. Such variety of possible process enactments calls for a common conceptual framework for defining, comparing, classifying, and integrating them. The paper introduces such a framework and describes a number of patterns for process execution and enactment based on it. These patterns result from a simple generic, goal-oriented model of medical process execution aiming at clarifying the role of software within the process and its environment. The patterns are illustrated on two real, non-trivial case studies.