Press Release

Contact:
Object Management Group
+1-781-444 0404
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BPM+ Health Community Launches COVID-19 Navigator

Access to COVID-19 information to improve the quality of clinical health care

BOSTON, MA – August 3, 2021 – The BPM+ Health community announced the beta availability of the COVID-19 Navigator to allow health care stakeholders to discover and access emerging guidance related to the pandemic quickly. The tool features a visual graph browser that will enable users to explore, traverse, and select areas of interest and shows interrelationships among guidance, treatments, activities, and knowledge.

"Search engines are fantastic tools, especially when the target of your search is known, but they are much more challenging to use when you aren't sure of precisely what you want," said Ken Rubin, Community Engagement Lead for BPM+ Health, and the lead of this effort.  "The COVID-19 Navigator offers a very different interactive experience than a search engine."   

The COVID-19 Navigator visually illustrates connection points across subjects, providing a very different user experience than a classic hierarchical tree.  This approach allows users to explore one area of interest, such as infection control, to discover additional related content in diagnostics or other related topics.  

The interactive tool has three principal sections:

  • An interactive graph, letting users select topics (e.g., care settings, care processes), drilling down into subsequent areas of detail until they identify assets or activities
  • A filter panel, allowing users to quickly narrow large lists of candidate assets to a more manageable subset, meeting criteria users specify
  • A results panel that indicates assets matching browsing and filter selections.

Content within the site is drawn from contributed authoritative sources, although individual users can submit content.  Content submissions are vetted to remove non-credible sources of information. Ultimately, users determine the quality, efficacy, and utility of the sources referenced.

The COVID-19 Navigator was created as a public good activity based upon voluntary contributions from individuals and companies.  "Volunteers have been working on this project since April 2020.  The BPM+ Health community -- a collection of informed healthcare IT contributors -- recognized the need at the onset of the pandemic and felt a responsibility as global citizens to do our part to help. While the effort has been sponsored and fostered by BPM+ Health, it has attracted contributors from across the sector and the globe who have come together to make this a reality.

"We have been fortunate to have had sustained participation from so many professionals in making this vision a reality," continued Rubin.  "I'm particularly grateful to Softarex Technologies, Inc. and Forge Forward Inc., who provided commercial support for the software development and program management, which was essential to our success – all contributed pro-bono.  It is heartening to see the goodwill and how much we can accomplish when we work together for a global cause."

Over 5,000 hours representing health informatics and technical skills have been contributed to date into the COVID-19 Navigator, with everything being made available as a public good and without commercial intent.  The BPM+ Health community hosted the COVID-19 Navigator initiative, which is a grassroots, community-driven open initiative.  The tool is available for use today, and activities are underway to bulk-load high volumes of COVID-19 content from established, credible sources and knowledgebases.  

Sign up for the COVID-19 Navigator here.

Be sure to join the BPM+ Health community at HIMSS 2021, August 9th-13th in Las Vegas, NV. For more information, click here.

About BPM+ Health
BPM+ Health is a community initiative to improve the quality and consistency of healthcare delivery. It will achieve this by applying business process modeling standards to clinical best practices, care pathways, and workflows directly at the point of care. A cross-discipline group of professional organizations, clinical societies, and healthcare providers, the community develops and pilots standards-driven healthcare process automation techniques to fully realize the benefits of Healthcare IT BPM+ Health is a program of the Object Management Group® (OMG®).  Visit https://www.bpm-plus.org/ for more information

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