FAQ
BPM+ Health was launched as a community of practice in September 2019 by the Object Management Group® (OMG®), an IT standards development organization. The objective of the community is to develop and pilot standards-based healthcare automation techniques, specifically the application of Business Process Management (BPM) standards to clinical care pathways and workflows. By applying IT standards to healthcare workflows, practitioners are able to leverage and disseminate evidence-based best practices at the point-of-care to save time, reduce error, and achieve better outcomes. Read the first deliverable authored by members leading to the successive launch of the community: Field Guide to Shareable Clinical Pathways.
BPM+ Health membership fees are cost-adjusted based upon the size and nature of your organization. Please visit the Membership page to learn more.
BPM+ Health Ambassadors are individuals whom are active in BPM+ Health and have committed to supporting and representing the BPM+ communities in both conversations and public appearances. They are working professionals in the HIT space whom are volunteering to support community efforts, beyond what is expected of general members.
BPM+ Health has seven Working Groups – Authoring, Process Automation and Enablement, Methodology, Organizational Adoption and Change Management, and Academic and Professional Education – in which members advance objectives of the community. The Working Groups meet face-to-face during OMG Technical Meetings and also collaborate virtually. BPM+ Health organizes workshops to educate attendees, increase adoption of best practices, and shape the community's roadmap.
BPM+ Health has a key role to play in improving the consistency of clinical practice and alignment to best practices, improving overall care quality measured through clinical quality measures. The Business Process Modeling (BPM) (or "BPM+") standards can be used to monitor patient cohorts through the automated extraction of critical health data and indicate patients who are at risk.
BPM+ Health is complementary to CQL approaches. CQL is an HL7 standard. CQL is another language that can be used in combination with BPM+ standards, such as Business Process Management Notation (BPMN), Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN), and Decision Model and Notation (DMN), to improve clinical quality.
The BPM+ Health community is focused on creating the style guidance to allow for guidelines to be shared, but we will not as a community share guidelines. BPM+ Health members will apply guidance and publish clinical guidelines on their own with subsets of that work being made available to the community.
That is not an uncommon scenario. In fact, most BPM+ Health Authoring Working Group members have the same business model. The use of BPM+ files makes guidelines easier to distribute and consume and does not conflict with their business model. The BPM+ Health community is helping to build the standards and infrastructure for organizations such as yours to automate practice guidelines and move them out to the broader marketplace. In summary, the BPM+ Health community by design is not authoring guidelines, rather it is focused on building an ecosystem to allow organizations like yours to effectively build, share, and deploy guidelines.
Presently, most guidelines are expressed in natural language, which has inherent ambiguities and inconsistencies that are difficult to identify and address. BPM+ use of formal modeling languages addresses these concerns, as well as gives more precise guidance that is easier to implement, validate, and automate. The Field Guide to Shareable Clinical Pathways written by members of BPM+ Health provides a method and style in order to create shareable clinical pathways.
Standards under the umbrella of Business Process Management (BPM), including Business Process Management Notation (BPMN), Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN), and Decision Model and Notation (DMN) from OMG, are not new. BPM+ standards are mature. This particular application of BPM+ standards to healthcare practice patterns is new.
FIHR is a standard from HL7 that provides access to data in systems. We embrace FHIR from HL7 and view it as a complimentary standard. Also, HL7 is an industry supporter of BPM+ Health. We anticipate that organizations will leverage FHIR to provide the data needed to inform and influence workflows expressed in BPM+.
In essence, we want care to follow the patient. It is critical that care pathways can follow the patient in today's increasingly mobile world. You are not going to be able to realize that in any proprietary vendor solution without industry-supported standards.
On average it takes 17 years for new clinical guidelines to be fully implemented into the healthcare ecosystem. BPM+ Health allows for the automation and integration of clinical guidelines into healthcare workflows. By doing this, they can be monitored, improved, and adjusted based upon overall impact.
BPM+ Health works collaboratively with Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), government, industry, and academia. Industry supporters include the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Health Level Seven International (HL7), Healthcare Services Platform Consortium (HSPC), the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).We are actively reaching out and engaging with new organizations that have complementary activities and work streams.
Please contact [email protected] for more information.
The Founding members of the BPM+ Health community are the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), Auxilium Technology Group, EvidenceCare, Mayo Clinic, Perspecta, Red Hat, Stevens Institute of Technology, Trisotech, University of Utah, University of Washington, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs..