Towards Open Process Models in Healthcare: Open Standards and Legal Considerations

Abstract

Process mining frameworks allow for visualizing and describing complex processes present in healthcare organizations. However, the process model that they create cannot be easily understood outside the context where healthcare data was originally captured because they are not specified in a standard language. This translates in barriers to share and compare processes specifications across various healthcare organizations so they can learn from each other. In order to enable the continuous improvement of the healthcare system, it is needed to specify both data and processes in a format that can be understood across different organizations, only then, effective mining of data to produce new knowledge can be performed. In this chapter we present the developments in the open standard openEHR that allow to specify clinical information in standard -compliant manner so it can be shared and understood across organizational boundaries.