Modeling clinical workflows using business process modeling notation

We present a semantic interoperability framework to represent Clinical Pathways (CP) as business process workflows represented using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). We take a knowledge management approach whereby we represent CP as a CP ontology. To represent a CP as a process workflow we have developed a high-level semantic mapping between the CP ontology and the BPMN ontology. The ontology mapping allows the alignment of semantic relations between two ontologies and thus ensures that a clinical process defined in the CP ontology is mapped to a standard BPMN workflow element.