A Process Architecture Approach to Manage Health Process Reforms

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) is often perceived as a top priority concern in organisations; both in public and private sectors. This has been clearly noticed in the Australian health care sector, evidenced by the Australian Government’s commitment to pursuing a reform agenda that reflects a new approach to improving health and aged care services. The adoption of a business process management approach can be a key tool to facilitate health reform in the public and private sectors. This approach provides a structured and hence rigorous approach to ensure that health processes are reviewed, improved and implemented consistently throughout the organisation, especially where public health services are provided from multiple service points. Process modeling is an embedded component of most BPM initiatives, yet a resource intensive task. How process models can be derived efficiently (i.e. with less resources and time) and effectively (at a high quality to meet the specific needs) is an integral element of interest to most organisations, however, this area of research is still in its infancy. This paper aims to address this gap by proposing a ‘process-pattern’ based approach to process modeling where models are created and managed within a ‘process architecture’. The process pattern approach is explained with evidence from a large state based health organisation using an integrated risk management process for health care service management as an example. The study employed an action research approach and the chapter unfolds its findings around the main phases of the research method. The contributions from this work are twofold. From the perspective of practice, it offers a validated high level example of a process pattern for an Integrated Risk Management Program for health. From an academic perspective: it presents a validated Risk Management process pattern for delivering health services which can be used as or a benchmark in further research.