Healthcare processes can be characterized as weakly-connected interacting lightweight workflows coping with different levels of granularity. Classical workflow notations are falling short with regard to supporting these kind of processes as they support monolithic processes which describe the life-cycle of individual cases and allow for hierarchical decomposition. The proclets framework is one of the formalisms providing a solution to this problem. Based on a large case study, describing the diagnostic process of the gynecological oncology care process of the Academic Medical Center (AMC), we identify the limitations of “monolithic workflows”. Moreover, by using the same case study, we investigate whether healthcare processes can be effectively described using proclets. In this way, we provide a comparison between the proclet framework and existing workflow languages and identify research challenges.
R. S. Mans, Nick C. Russell, Wil M. P. van der Aal