New consortium works on mixing in IT to improve care outcomes

The Object Management Group has launched BPM+ Health to aid healthcare stakeholders in leveraging health information technology to improve the quality of clinical care.

Members of BPM+ Health are working to improve the quality and consistency of patient outcomes by applying business processes and modeling techniques to point-of-care delivery.

Founding members include providers, vendors, universities, specialty societies and the Department of Veterans Affairs.


Among those groups include the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, HL7, the Healthcare Services Platform Consortium, the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

The goal is to advance the consistency, efficiency and quality of care by improving the sharing of health practice patterns, workflows and clinical pathways among vendors and institutions. Organizational and corporate memberships are available, and individuals may join and participate in projects, but they would be limited in scope.

Goals for BPM+ Health include:

• Developing best practices around modeling and sharing clinical pathways, clinical guidelines and other healthcare knowledge.

• Promoting the use of standards such as BPMM, DMM and CMMN to produce deliverables to maximize their usefulness and shareability and to promote their adoption.

• Cultivating a knowledge ecosystem devoted to improving national and international health by leveraging open available industry standards to remove barriers to sharing knowledge.

• Improving the precision and compliance with best practices, resulting in better implementations.

• Collaborating with other standards developing organizations in the healthcare industry.

“What is exciting about BPM+ Health is that it lays the foundation to allow for best clinical practices to follow the patient through their journey,” says Ken Rubin, director of standards for the Veteran Health Administration’s Office of Knowledge-based Systems,

He says substantial parts of veteran care are outside of the VA’s walls. Because of that, it is essential for the VA to be able to effectively support its patient population wherever veterans elect to receive care.

Still, a recurring challenge for providers is disseminating evidence-based practices to the point of care, which particularly affects a growing mobile patient population. To address this, BPM+ Health seeks to improve care consistency as patients’ transition regardless of whether that is traversing tiers of care such as a patient being discharged to long-term care, or getting specialty referrals.

As part of the rollout of BPM+ Health, one of the first deliverables is the Field Guide to Sharable Clinical Pathways, with content on how business processes and case modeling standards can improve efficiency and quality of care while being shared across healthcare organizations.