Model Human Behavior: Don't Constrain It!

Healthcare processes are complex and highly variable from day to day. Healthcare process execution can be affected by any participant in a process, including clinicians, the patient, and the patient's family, as well as environmental factors such as clinician, staff, facility and equipment availability, and patient clinical status. However, only a few solutions exist that enable computer support for a process to address the full complexity and variability of healthcare processes. We have re-conceptualized workflow and developed an innovative process representation and execution framework based on concepts from software engineering, machine learning, complexity, and database management. This new framework frees processes to track human behavior, thereby releasing us from the constraints of past methods. Our approach is also serving as a new architecture for software systems.