Business rules management in healthcare: A lifecycle approach

This paper proposes a framework to apply business rules management (BRM) to healthcare service delivery. Implementation of recently government-mandated quality standards for healthcare provider requires them to modify or change their business processes, practices, and approach to healthcare delivery. An automated business rules management will provide significant benefits to these providers. The benefits include greater control, improved flexibility, and the ability to rapidly deploy business rules across processes, information systems and channels (web, legacy, wireless and otherwise). These benefits, in addition to trends in service orientated architectures, web semantics, and business process management, have spawned an emerging business rules engine (BRE) market. Despite these developments, little has been published in MIS journals that examine the management of business rules management systems (BRMS) development and deployments in general, and in healthcare service sector in particular. Making use of structuration research methods, we collect data from leading developers, end-users, researchers and thought leaders from the industry. Data collection results revealed a business rules management lifecycle inclusive of these steps: align, capture, organize, author, distribute, test, apply, and maintain. The contextual influences, actors, inputs, outputs and artifacts are identified in each step. Academic and managerial contributions, as well as recommendations for future research are provided. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.