Activity-based Process Integration in Healthcare with the User Requirements Notation

The healthcare sector faces important challenges in evaluating and improving its services to meet desired targets, patient needs, and government requirements. In particular, the introduction of a new process or information system in healthcare is a challenging task, especially in the absence of mature practices for requirements engineering and process modeling. Most of today's healthcare process research is focused on mappings between existing processes and new ones without considering the different needs of multiple stakeholders and the satisfaction of organizational goals. In this paper, we introduce a novel Activity-based Process Integration (AbPI) approach that highlights integration opportunities of each new activity into current processes. AbPI exploits the User Requirements Notation (URN) language to model, analyze, and estimate the potential impact of each integration opportunity on performance objectives, organizational goals, and stakeholder satisfaction. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach with an illustrative example (increasing patient satisfaction in an Emergency Room). Preliminary results show the feasibility of the approach as well as many potential benefits over existing approaches.