title: From the description of activities to the identification of risks for clinical management: a proposal of building, merging and sharing knowledge representations of care processes.
abstract: Management of clinical processes and hospital activities takes advantage of business process reengineering methodology. It is now recognized that care process modeling must integrate the definition of goals and the assessment of risk. Two kinds of issues have been outlined: 1) the lack of an integrated model to identify and describe processes and their components according to a functional point of view; and 2) an increasing amount of documents that hospital staff members have to create, collect, index and maintain. As initial models focused only on a structural view of activities, we reviewed different sources of standards and norms to extract and classify a set of metadata aimed at describing any activity and its outcomes. The model includes links to structured terminologies to name attributes or value them. An object-oriented information model has been created and implemented to test the relevance and the feasibility of the modeling approach. Conceptually speaking, this model gives opportunity to bridge tacit and explicit knowledge. Practically speaking, limits to generalization remain partly due to the lack of a template processes database.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire STIC Santé, Faculté de Médecine, Université Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France. pascal.staccini@unice.fr
authors.forename: Pascal
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Staccini
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Joubert
authors.forename: Rémy
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Collomp
authors.forename: Jean-François
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Quaranta
authors.forename: Marius
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fieschi
mesh_terms: D006302:Health Services Research; D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D008331:Management Information Systems; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010346:Patient Care Management; D017064:Process Assessment, Health Care; D012308:Risk Management; D013597:Systems Analysis; D018511:Systems Integration