The Alpha-Flow Use-Case of Breast Cancer Treatment - Modeling Inter-institutional Healthcare Workflows by Active Documents

In healthcare, inter-institutional process support implicates decentralized and ad-hoc workflows. From the perspective of system integration, the autonomy of the sites which are participating in a healthcare network is mostly untouchable. Traditional activity-oriented workflow models or content-oriented workflow models do not provide adequate support in such system environments and workflow scenarios. The objective of the alpha-Flow approach is to enable distributed, ad-hoc process support with initially unknown sets of actors and institutions. In its document-oriented workflow model, electronic documents become active documents and act as software agents as the primary means of coordination. This paper details the healthcare use-case for the alpha-Flow model by the example of cooperative breast-cancer treatment scenarios.