Coordination of Inter-organisational Healthcare Processes via Specialisation of Internet-Based Object Life Cycles

We describe an approach to healthcare coordination using object life cycles (OLCs) [1]. By consulting the OLC of a given patient object instance, the legal methods to apply to that object at that time can be identified – acting as a resource for a clinical workstation accessing the Internet-based instance stored by the host of the interorganisational hospital information system (HIS). To support coordination, each activity results in the posting of summary data to the HIS – handled generically as GEHR (Good Electronic Health Record) [2] transaction archetypes. As well as providing predefined care plan templates, OLCs also allow flexibility and individualisation of care plans. Behaviour-consistent specialisation of OLCs [1] permits the definition of valid variant OLCs. We illustrate the proposed concept in the context of a hospital Early Discharge Program (EDP) – currently driven by a hospital-based care coordinator. An HIS that supported the coordination would allow significant expansion of the program.