Track
Health Care IT
Abstract
Business Information Technology (IT) alignment focuses on the efficient support of business processes by IT. Therefore,existing software artifacts are addressed by business process models. When the processes change, however, there is a need toadjust the supporting software systems. Thus, already during the design phase of business process models, IT artifacts shouldto be considered. The instrument of conceptual modeling gains wide acceptance, especially in the health care sector todescribe and manage clinical processes, such as Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) and Clinical Pathways (CP). There are noholistic approaches so far that provide the alignment between these two concepts and ensure the quality of treatment and theconsistent adaptation of a Hospital Information System (HIS), in particular the hospital’s Workflow Management System(WfMS). To link business process models and the WfMS, the Description Kit Approach (DKA) is used to prepare conceptualmodels to make them automatically analyzable. It is suggested that at an early stage of the modeling process the use ofguidelines has an substantial benefit for avoiding integration conflicts in conceptual models. Furthermore, due to the way theapproach bridges the semantic gap, changes of business requirements as well as technical implementation restrictionsinfluence each other. This results in an ongoing system development process that can be interpreted as a permanentmanagement of application systems. Our results contribute to model-based management theories that have so far neglectedthe distributed construction of conceptual models.
Recommended Citation
Juhrisch, Martin; Schlieter, Hannes; and Dietz, Gunnar, "Model-Supported Business Alignment of IT — Conceptual Foundations" (2011). AMCIS 2011 Proceedings - All Submissions. 206.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2011_submissions/206