Understanding requirements for computer-aided healthcare workflows: experiences and challenges

Abstract

Medical informatics and software engineering researchers have studied how to use software technologies to define, analyze, automate, and provide decision support for healthcare workflows. We, as the requirement engineering and prototyping group of the Siemens R&D center, have been involved in the research and development of healthcare workflows. During interactions with the workflow users and developers, we found significant confusion about the terminologies and the purposes of supporting different healthcare workflows. Thus, we are motivated to classify computer-aided healthcare workflows, including their approaches, goals, and major characteristics. This paper also discusses workflow application issues and software challenges based upon our experiences and research.