Question

Question 4

Consider the following issues that come up when introducing a BPMS in a hospital to support preoperative care, i.e. the preparation and management of a patient prior to surgery.

On hearing about the plans to introduce a BPMS, the surgeons flatly reject to cooperate on this endeavor. Their claim is that each patient is an individual person that cannot be trusted to the care of a one-size-fits-all system.

The anesthetists in the hospital use a decision support system that monitors the proper dosage of anesthetics to patients. The system is developed as a standalone system that is difficult to synchronise with the BPMS, which has to feed the decision support system with patient data.

The nurses are provided with mobile devices, which they can use to access their worklist handlers. However, they find it difficult to follow up on the automatic notifications which are signaled to them as gentle vibrations of the device.

Classify these to the technical or organisational issues, or both.

Answer 1

1.  Organizational issue: BPMS's can be highly tailored to take patient-specific data into account.

2. Technical issue: The integration of the decision support system may require additional, customized software development.

3.  Organizational and technical: The nurses may one the one hand get accustomed to using the BPMS in general and worklist handlers specifically. On the other hand, it may not be a good technical solution to use vibration signals—an alternative would be, for example, to use sound signals.