September 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8orkflow" is one of those terms that at a superficial level, one might consider a business "buzzword," but that would be an unfair assessment of the power of workflow. At its most basic level, Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines "workflow" as "the sequence of steps involved in moving from the beginning to the end of a working process." But, to do a constructive business workflow that teases out areas of error-prone, non-value-added redundant work, one has to really look at the multitude of different scenarios a typical workflow encounters. Once these different scenarios have been defined, a detailed analysis needs to be performed that seeks - through the intersection of people, process, and technology - to mitigate the problem areas and make things frictionless for all players involved in the workflow.Healthcare is a particularly tricky area because of the heavy industry regulation, the potential life-and-death impacts of workflow failures, and the high-dollar revenue impacts of incorrect or absent critical documentation required for payment of big-ticket hospital stays. Let us focus on one particular area of the patient's experience at a hospital ­ scheduling an appointment for a visit or a surgical procedure. Our sample scenario starts with a doctor calling to refer a patient for a certain type of procedure. Right here, you have something quite unique to healthcare, since the instigator of the transaction that is not the actual consumer of the transaction (i.e., the doctor is initiating the transaction on behalf of his/her patient). The agent at the hospital needs to capture an array of demographic information on the patient (name, date of birth, address, family members, etc.) and then has to be able to get insurance information for the patient, if available, as the vast majority of hospital services are paid by third-party medical insurance (including Medicare or Medicaid). Before much else happens, the agent must see if there are other records for the patient at the hospital so that previous medical history can be brought over to better inform care decisions on the part of the patient's likely care team. A misspelled name, a transposed number in a date of birth, and vital information for the healthcare of that patient will not come over to the record and there will be two separate entries at the hospital for one patient with key health information not flowing to the caregiver.Continuing down this path, we encounter another anomaly of the world of healthcare; that the purchaser of healthcare services (the insurance company) is not the The Impact of the Concept of Workflow in a Complex Healthcare EnvironmentRICH TEMPLE, VICE PRESIDENT, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, DEBORAH HEART AND LUNG CENTER"WIN MY View
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