Understanding and Classifying Requirements for Computer-Aided Healthcare Workflows

Medical informatics and software engineering researchers have studied how to use software technologies to define, analyze, automate, and provide decision support for healthcare workflows. We, as the requirements engineering and prototyping group of the Siemens R&D center, have been involved in the research and development of both financial and clinical healthcare workflows. During interactions with the workflow users (e.g. physicians, nurses), researchers and software developers, we found significant confusion about the terminologies and the purposes of supporting different healthcare workflows. Thus, we are motivated to classify computer-aided healthcare workflows, including their approaches, goals, and major characteristics. This paper also discusses workflow application issues and software challenges based upon our experiences and research.