Transforming sterile processing departments by service-oriented business process management

Abstract

One major cause that dramatically impacts patient safety is the use of unclean reusable medical equipment (RME), delivered from a sterile processing department (SPD). Unfortunately, current reprocessing practice is mostly driven by human labour and control, which is error-prone and inefficient. In this paper, business process management is proposed to support modelling, automating, monitoring, and analysing sterile reprocessing procedures. The main contributions are: 1) identifying the main factors in the current practice that compromise patient safety 2) proposing a service-oriented business process modelling framework to publish, discover, reuse, and compose interoperable services for different purposes 3) promoting healthcare workflow to control the execution status and identifying the key architectural requirements for a healthcare workflow system 4) proposing a service-oriented architecture and validating it with our SPD workflow prototyping system, SPDFLOW. To our best knowledge, SPDFLOW is the first effort in exploring healthcare workflow technology in the SPD domain.