A Method for Systematic Adaptation and Synchronization of Healthcare Processes

International organizations, as the World Health Organization (WHO) and national governments are constantly defining (or modifying) new healthcare protocols and procedures. Those changes have a significant impact, on one side, on the organizational concerns of a great number of healthcare institutions and centers, and on the other side, on their health information systems that need to be adapted according to the new (or modified) procedures. Administrative workflows are commonly defined by a high level entity and they must then be applied on different institutions ruled by this high level entity. Those workflows must then be adapted to the particular circumstances of each institution, complying with the general regulations of the process established at the top level. This problem, called Hierarchical Adaptation Problem, also implies establishing the methods to evolve together the high level regulation. Such methods must maintain the consistency among the different levels by means of the propagation of the changes to all the different adaptations of the original workflow. To solve this problem, this work introduces the Hierarchical Adaptation Method. A method based on ontologies to define the rules that must be satisfied by a generic workflow to be considered adaptable to different application cases and the rules that must be satisfied by its adapted versions. Moreover, it provides the operations to facilitate both adaptation of administrative workflows and propagation of changes.