α-Flow: A Document-Based Approach to Inter-institutional Process Support in Healthcare

摘要

Inter-institutional collaboration requires clean task boundaries and the separation of responsibilities. In addition, healthcare processes are intrinsically fluid. Traditional activity-oriented workflow models or content-oriented workflow models do not provide adequate support for the paper-based working practice in healthcare. The α-Flow approach adopts electronic documents as the primary means of information exchange, fusing both paradigms into a combined workflow schema model, wherein workflow schemas are represented as documents which are shared coequally to content documents.