Improving Knowledge-Intensive Health Care Processes beyond Efficiency

Health care has been one of the most important domains for Business Process Management (BPM) research and practice for many years. Through an exploratory case study conducted in a real organization, here named “SpecialClinic”, this research aims to investigate what lies beyond “traditional ” BPM, in particular process efficiency, as practiced by many organizations today. It focuses on customer-facing knowledge-intensive BPs in the case organization and aims to investigate their ongoing improvement. The main findings of this research challenge the main objectives of BP improvement (i.e. reduced costs, improved efficiency) as they show that some organizations are making their “to-be ” processes slower and more expensive, yet significantly improved in terms of quality of patient care. In addition to its main research contribution related to new approaches to improvement of knowledge-intensive BPs, this work offers some important lessons for the BPM practitioners interested in expanding the current boundaries of BPM