Business Process Management in Healthcare

While this article focuses on healthcare, it also reflects the need for BPM in nearly every discipline. Business processes drive efficient and effective operations, activities, and procedures. From this perspective, read this article to better understand the application of business process management (BPM) in an area quite possibly outside your normal scope of work. How do business processes and enterprise resource planning systems work together to support information technology in a business organization?

The emphasis of performance management in health care is shifting from output or outcome-based to a system-based approach. In particular, clinicians and managers are re-focusing their attention on processes so as to achieve better health system performance, as a reaction to the financial crisis. Health care management is increasingly applying systems thinking and business process management (BPM) as philosophies, which have proved to make a difference in organizational performance and competitiveness to the industry at large. This commentary provides answers to five questions that emerged through a reflective exercise and use of secondary data sources and informal interviews. These questions are intended to contribute toward better understanding of the meaning and application of BPM by scholars and practitioners in health care management. The questions are as follows: What is BPM and is it relevant to health care? Has BPM been extensively applied to health care? Why focus on quality in health care delivery? What are the current challenges of health care and can BPM help? What role BPM will play in future to facilitate effective health care management?

Keywords: business process management, performance management, quality of care

Source: Sandra C. Buttigieg, Prasanta K. Dey, and Dorothy Gauci, https://web.archive.org/web/20161108155234/https://www.dovepress.com/business-process-management-in-health-care-current-challenges-and-futu-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-IEH
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