BPM automation for UK

Our customer is a UK-based agency specializing in clinical and residential care, operating several care homes and providing mental health rehabilitative services.

The customer had an idea of building a healthcare business process management (BPM) system for care organizations, consisting of several subsystems. The BPM system would allow managing and analyzing medication intake as well as collecting statistics on treatment dynamics per patient. The accumulated information would then be used for selecting and recommending a suitable treatment for a particular patient, thus facilitating care providers’ data-driven decision-making.

The agency turned to Plagats Consulting for healthcare software development services. They were looking to develop an MVP of the BPM system first, which would enable resource planning, employee management, and end-to-end visibility into care home tasks and performance. With time, more sub-systems would be connected to this functional core.

Initially planned to be introduced within the agency’s own care homes, the solution was to be developed with a view to distributing it as a marketable product for other care organizations in the future.

Solution

Within 14 months, Plagats Consulting business process management consultants developed a healthcare-specific web application allowing the staff at care homes to effectively manage their tasks and performance, including monitoring, tracking, analyzing, and reporting. Plagats Consulting team also developed an API so that other parts of this in-progress ecosystem could interact with the solution, for example by triggering task creation or required actions.

The main use cases of the application include:

• Managing patient-related and general tasks. While forming the care plan for a particular patient, a doctor creates and assigns tasks, defining the type and frequency of activities appropriate for this patient.
• Reporting an issue or an accident. Once reported, it triggers the creation of an event of a certain type in the system, which then automatically generates respective tasks on the basis of predefined templates. For example, if a patient escapes a care home, employees must call the police, gather information from eyewitnesses, draw up a report, contact relatives, as well as check the patient’s health upon return. Each task starts in a configurable time after the issue occurs and has a due date in accordance with the law.

In such a way, all the actions that are determined by law and are obligatory for implementation are already predefined in the solution. Due to this, while opening such a care facility, one does not need to be well acquainted with or examine laws, as the solution will prompt necessary actions in this or that case automatically.

Task management automation

Tasks are the core element of the system that enables resource planning. Tasks differ by importance, duration, as well as a recurrence of interventions and required allocations (department, employee, rank, and specialization). The solution comes with a broad set of predefined tasks.

There are two types of tasks in the BPM system:

• Clinical tasks are directly related to patients and span a range of activities and involved employees. Clinical tasks can include nutrition, personal care, physical observation, therapeutic treatment, medical appointments, entertainment, education, physical exercises, and so on. The built-in functionality allows nurses to track all patient-related activities and submit details, for instance the type of meal taken, portion size, etc. This information is then displayed in a food diary with the corresponding date and time. Clinical tasks are processed by employees of clinical departments and are completed in succession.
• Non-clinical tasks include activities associated with managing a care organization and are performed by employees of non-clinical departments, such as IT, financial, legal, HR, and so on. Apart from triggered tasks, there are general planned tasks, e.g. updating insurance once a year.