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?
This paper is a reflective exercise and makes use of secondary data sources and informal interviews as information sources. Informal interviews were held with a number of individuals in the areas of management, clinical care, pharmacy, and academia within the health care sector in Malta and the UK. The informal interviews addressed the informants’ general experiences in the health care sector and aimed to highlight the relevant issues and challenges in health care that would be apt to address with the BPM approach. Table 1 gives background information on the informants who were involved in this reflective exercise.
| Sector | Number of Interviewees | Average number of years in the health care sector |
| Clinicians | 7 | 15 |
| Management | ||
|
Top Management
|
4 | 10 |
|
Middle
|
8 | 15 |
|
Departmental
|
9 | 20 |
| Information technology | 2 | 5 |
| Academia | 2 | 20 |
Table1 Descriptive characteristics
The secondary data sources were the result of reviewing the literature on the wider use of BPM within industry and more importantly on its application in the health care sector, using PubMed, which is a search engine that indexes references and abstracts in the broad fields of life and biomedical sciences.