BPMN-Based Representation and Comparison of Clinical Pathways for Catheter-Related Bloodstream Infections

Healthcare processes require continuous support in order to face the increasing demand for optimal quality of care and to provide a sound basis for integrating different sources of medical knowledge. A very important issue to consider in the medical domain is the fact that clinical process activities intertwine with data, and thus, process-oriented information systems play a crucial role in healthcare management. Business-process modeling techniques can successfully be applied in order to represent clinical pathways and guidelines in a standardized way, by giving a more understandable high-level description of evidence-based medical practice. In this paper, we address (i) the representation of clinical pathways by means of conceptual process models, and (ii) by considering process-related information. Moreover, (iii) we apply our methodology to the modeling of two clinical pathways for catheter-related bloodstream infections adopted in two different hospitals in Europe and U.S., respectively, and (iv) we take advantage of the application of our approach for comparing the resulting processes at a higher level of abstraction.