Integration of IHE-Based Systems with Petri Net Workflow Management System

Workflow management is crucial to elevate the efficiency and quality of healthcare services, and current healthcare IT solutions typically lack support to process oriented requirement. In order to introduce workflow management to healthcare information systems, the heterogeneous systems that coexist in healthcare environment have to be integrated for integral workflow. At build-time, the workflow roles played by the systems have to be identified to establish the workflow model, and with this model the systems are integrated at run-time. Integrating the healthcare enterprise (IHE) proposes some profiles for healthcare system workflow integration, and IHE-based systems typically state conformance to certain actors in profiles. Therefore, it is possible to start from these integration statements to model workflow and integrate the systems. In this paper, we present the method of translating integration profiles of IHE into Petri net based workflow models and integrating these systems with Petri net workflow management system (WFMS). This method provides a starting point to bridge the gap between traditional applications and process-oriented healthcare solutions.