Workflow Support and Optimization in Nursing Agencies

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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.