Workflow Support and Optimization in Nursing Agencies

像大多数提供医疗保健的组织一样，护理机构正面临着 不断增加的任务需求和相互关联的复杂性、财务压力以及 监管要求。为高效、可靠和准确地处理复杂任务而开发的工作流方法具有应对这些挑战的潜力。这个SBIR项目的总体目标是创建一个软件系统，使护理机构能够对其组织工作流程进行建模，支持这些过程，并确定正在进行的优化过程中的约束(工作流瓶颈)。 该系统的核心部分将是治疗指南、模型模拟、自动化任务 支持、资源分配、异常处理和报告。对系统性临床的支持 评估和与研究人员的合作将包括在内。该软件将生成 通过不断进化以满足需求并减少护理机构市场中的生产率限制，从而实现商业价值。为此目的建立软件开发框架需要在足够高的抽象级别上处理工作流建模和软件系统工程问题，以满足预期的灵活性和专门化需求，同时仍保持内部一致性。使用工作流对象模型来生成系统代码使软件框架能够以经济高效的方式适应不断发展的市场的变化(例如，政策制定者和支付者的行政要求的频繁变化)。通过提供反映不同活动级别(例如，患者评估、患者护理、报告、转诊、财务、临床研究)的统一工作流模型，多级别分析可以更高效，可以更容易地探索级别之间的交互，并且随着时间的推移，可以生成更准确和更有用的模型。

Nursing agencies are, like most organizations providing health care, being challenged with increasing amounts and interrelated complexities of task demands, financial pressures, and regulatory requirements. Workflow methods, being developed for the purpose of handling complex tasks with efficiency, reliability, and accuracy, have potential to meet these challenges. The overall goal of this SBIR project is to create a software system enabling nursing agencies to model their organizational workflow, support these processes, and identify constraints (workflow bottlenecks) in an ongoing optimization process. Core components of the system will be treatment guidelines, model simulation, automated task support, resource allocation, exception handling, and reporting. Support for systematic clinical assessment and collaboration with researchers will be included. The software will generate commercial value by continually evolving to meet needs and reduce productivity constraints in the nursing agency market. Establishing a software development framework for this purpose requires addressing both workflow modeling and software system engineering problems at a high enough level of abstraction to cope with anticipated needs for flexibility and specialization, yet still retaining internal consistency. Using an object model of workflow to generate system code makes it possible for the software framework to adapt to changes in the evolving market (e.g., frequent changes in administrative requirements from policy makers and payers) in a cost-effective manner. By providing a unified workflow model reflecting different levels of activity (e.g., patient assessment, patient care, reporting, referral, financial, clinical research), multi-level analysis can be more efficient, interactions between the levels can be more easily explored, and over time, a more accurate and useful model can be generated.