Supporting process execution by interdisciplinary healthcare teams: Middleware design for IBM BPM

Abstract Interdisciplinary healthcare teams (IHTs) are involved in clinical processes composed of tasks requiring specific capabilities from different disciplines, often executed at different times. Although some hospitals use Business Process Management (BPM) suites to support their clinical activities, these tools are often unable to support the dynamic and capability-based allocation of tasks to the most suitable practitioner during the execution of a given process. Extensions, such as our previous work on ontological frameworks, exist that enable reasoning about IHT dynamics and allocate tasks to practitioners on the fly, but they are either unable to interact with commercial BPM suites or they are tightly integrated to one specific BPM suite. This paper contributes an innovative BPM-oriented middleware that enables existing BPM suites to interact with a semantic layer, hence offering more opportunities for deploying such advanced functionality in healthcare organizations. As a proof of concept, the middleware implementation is connected to a specific semantic layer and a specific commercial BPM suite (from IBM). The resulting system is illustrated with an acute stroke management process, hence demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed middleware-based approach. This solution compares advantageously against related work.