PERSONALIZED MEDICAL WORKFLOW THROUGH SEMANTIC BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Business Process Management (BPM) systems are becoming the runtime governance of emerging Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. They provide tools and methodologies to design and compose Web services that can be executed as business processes and monitored by BPM consoles. Ontology, as a formal declarative knowledge representation model, provides semantics upon which machine understandable knowledge can be obtained, and as a result, it makes machine intelligence possible. By combining ontology and BPM, Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) provides a novel approach to align business processes from both business perspective and IT perspective. Current healthcare systems can adopt SBPM to make themselves ubiquitous, adaptive, intelligent, and then serve patients better. Our ontology makes our vision of personalized healthcare possible by capturing all necessary knowledge for a complex personalized healthcare scenario including patient care, insurance policies, drug prescriptions, and compliances. This paper presents a hospital workflow management system that allows users, from physicians to administrative assistants, to create context-aware medical workflows, and execute them on-the-fly with the support from an ontological knowledge base.