The particular focus of the project is on the hospital’s operating unit and the requirement to support the process stages of perioperative and pre-admission care. The approach is based on the observation that such processes are typically well-structured. Thus, they may be represented by a process model and lend themselves to be supported by a BPM solution. Consequently, explicit process descriptions may be used to guide the execution of business tasks.
PERIKLES is based on the BPM solution YAWL, a highly expressive and flexible workflow language that is based on academic rigor and possesses a formal semantic. YAWL is also a powerful open source workflow management system, chiefly maintained and developed by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia.
In close cooperation with the BPM Group at QUT, the workflow management system YAWL will be extended to add new functionalities that support coordination-centric schedule-aware workflows.
The second key technology that the project is based on is related to auto-identification by sensors and the automatic detection of procedural events in the operating unit. PERIKLES investigates and utilizes innovative concepts of event detection and processing with the ultimate goal of making perioperative processes context-aware in near real-time. This is an important precondition for supporting process awareness of the clinical stakeholders in the OR as well as facilitating on-the-day-of-surgery recoordination that may arise due to unforeseen procedural exceptions, such as emergency situations.
The resulting prototype solution that is currently being developed will be characterized by the following key properties and functionalities: