BPMN in healthcare: Challenges and best practices

The design and analysis of process models is a critical factor for organizational improvement across various industries. Thanks to its potential to enable common understanding and foster automation, process modeling is increasingly adopted in the healthcare sector. However, the complexity of the healthcare domain makes process modeling a challenging task, potentially explaining the modest uptake of process modeling standards like the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). In this paper, we identify common challenges of process modeling in healthcare, elicited from healthcare process modeling initiatives and supported by the literature. For each challenge, we present some BPMN best practices in the form of ready-to-use process fragments that guide the standard modeling of complex healthcare aspects. Also, we report the results of a first evaluation of the use and perceived usefulness of best practices conducted with junior experts in medicine and IT. We observed that the domain-specific process fragments help to capture healthcare aspects in detail and are perceived as a source of learning, turning out to be especially useful for modelers with a basic understanding of BPMN and the healthcare domain.