Knowledge Management in Health Care: An Architectural Framework for Clinical Process Management Systems

This work describes the architectural framework of a clinical process management system. It supports the extraction, from textual documents, of ontologies, clinical processes and guidelines and allows their formal description using ontology and workflow representation languages. Clinical processes and guidelines are stored in a knowledge base and classified w.r.t. the concepts contained in the ontologies. Starting from this process-centered vision of health care practices the system is able to enhance cost control and patient safety, reducing risks due to medical errors and adverse events. The main goal of the system is to assist in executing the clinical processes by providing intelligence functionalities, based on workflow mining techniques, and in monitoring processes during their execution. Furthermore, acquired process instances can be analyzed to identify main causes of risks, to control costs and, potentially, to suggest clinical process restructuring or improvement