Transforming sterile processing departments by service-oriented business process management

One major cause that dramatically impacts patient safety is the use of unclean reusable medical equipment (RME), delivered from a sterile processing department (SPD). Unfortunately, current reprocessing practice is mostly driven by human labor and control, which is error-prone and inefficient. In this paper, business process management is proposed to support modeling, automating, monitoring, and analyzing sterile reprocessing procedures. The main contributions are: i) identifying the main factors in the current practice that compromise patient safety; ii) proposing a Service-Oriented business process modeling framework to publish, discover, reuse, and compose interoperable services for different purposes; iii) promoting healthcare workflow to control the execution status and identifying the key architectural requirements for a healthcare workflow system; iv) proposing a service-oriented architecture and validating it with our SPD workflow prototyping system, SPDFLOW. To our best knowledge, SPDFLOW is the first effort in exploring healthcare workflow technology in the SPD domain.