The use of business workflow models in healthcare is limited because of insufficient capture of complexities associated with behavior of interdisciplinary healthcare teams that execute healthcare workflows. In this paper we present a novel framework that builds on the well-founded business workflow model formalism and related infrastructures and introduces a formal semantic layer that describes...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate healthcare students' perceptions of an introductory interprofessional exercise and their team dynamics. DESIGN A workshop was developed, combining second-year medical students, fourth-year nursing students, and third-year pharmacy students to work as an interdisciplinary team. The teams alternated between working together on patient cases focusing on chronic obstructive ...

The management team of Memorial Medical Center must make a decision regarding the continuation of one of its outpatient clinics. To provide better community service, MMC developed three outpatient clinics throughout a large metropolitan area. Over the past several years, one of the clinics has consistently been a financial loser. The losses have grown even as the costs of maintaining the clinic...

The publication of To Err Is Human in the USA and An Organisation with a Memory in the UK more than a decade ago put patient safety firmly on the clinical and policy agenda. To date, however, progress in improving safety and outcomes of hospitalized patients has been slower than the authors of these reports had envisaged. Here, we first review and analyse some of the reasons for the lack of evi...

This is the second article in a two-part series on leadership. The first examined transformational approaches to effective leadership in healthcare settings. This article describes the strategies that nurses can use to ensure healthcare teams are effective: team reflection; ensuring all members participate; and establishing ground rules.

RHCMS (Regional Healthcare Center Management System) is an Internet-based simulation training system for Regional Healthcare-Centers (RHCs) managers. The system is based on an integrative model, designed and developed by an interdisciplinary team of experts, for the purpose of training and developing RHCs' managers. This model involves the study of the following fields: healthcare management, b...

The paper presents a Virtual Organization (VO) framework which incorporates wireless technologies support at the point of care in the clinical healthcare environment. It reflects the move to patient-centric healthcare given by multi-disciplinary care team collaborating in the patient’s treatment. The work sheds light into how VOs incorporating wireless technologies can meet the needs of the car...

Medical errors continue to occur despite multiple strategies devised for their prevention. Although many safety initiatives lead to improvement, they are often short lived and unsustainable. Our goal was to build a culture of patient safety within a structure that optimised teamwork and ongoing engagement of the healthcare team. Teamwork impacts the effectiveness of care, patient safety and cli...

Early morning emergency calls are varied and challenging. They raise issues about clinical care, payment of country doctors, interaction with the healthcare team and the philosophy of care.