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?
Performance management in health care, despite an emphasis on processes, is still very much focused on patient outcomes. While targeting optimal patient outcomes remains the ultimate aim of health service delivery, re-focusing clinical performance on processes is proving to be the means by which patient morbidity and mortality statistics can be improved. Today, systems thinking and business process management (BPM) have become philosophies of industry management. The health care industry is among the fastest growing industries. It is not surprising that this sector is turning to the wider business world for principles and practices that inspire the achievement of the optimal tradeoff between efficiency and patient responsiveness. The main aim of this commentary is to explore how BPM principles can help achieve superior health care management and discuss the application of BPM principles within health care. While secondary data sources show that most of the practical examples found in this area are hospital based, BPM principles are applicable across the wide spectrum of health services, such as primary care and public health. Despite the fact that the provision of these services is very different in terms of operating systems, BPM has developed into a possible driver and tool for the seamless integration of health care services. Using secondary data sources, informal interviews with practitioners, and researchers from the health care sector, this paper specifically offers responses to the following five emerging questions: 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 will BPM play in the future to facilitate effective health care management? In other words, this paper is intended to provide a debate on the use of BPM in health care while discussing its current challenges and future prospects.