Supporting healthcare processes with YAWL4Healthcare

In healthcare, processes concerning the diagnosis and treatment of patients can be best characterized as weakly-connected inter-acting light-weight workflows where tasks reside at different levels of granularity. Moreover, in hospitals many work items are linked with appointments. To date, Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) fall short in supporting healthcare processes as no scheduling support and inter-workflow support is offered. To address these problems, we present the YAWL4Healthcare WfMS which supports the seamless integration of unscheduled (flow) and scheduled (schedule) tasks and which allows for dividing complex entangled processes into simple autonomous fragments that may cope with different levels of granularity. Note that our system has been realized by adding significant extensions to the open-source YAWL WfMS