A Methodological Framework for the Integrated Design of Decision-Intensive Care Pathways—an Application to the Management of COPD Patients

Healthcare processes are by nature complex, mostly due to their multi-disciplinary character that requires continuous coordination between care providers. They encompass both organizational and clinical tasks, the latter ones driven by med- ical knowledge, which is inherently incomplete and distributed among people having different expertise and roles. Care pathways refer to planning and coordination of care processes related to specific groups of patients in a given setting. The goal in defining and following care pathways is to improve the quality of care in terms of patient satisfaction, costs reduction, and medical outcome. Thus, care pathways are a promising methodological tool for standardizing care and decision-making. Business process management techniques can successfully be used for representing organiza- tional aspects of care pathways in a standard, readable, and accessible way, while supporting process development, analysis, and re-engineering. In this paper, we intro- duce a methodological framework that fosters the integrated design, implementation, and enactment of care processes and related decisions, while considering proper rep- resentation and management of organizational and clinical information. We focus here and discuss in detail the design phase, which encompasses the simulation of care pathways. We show how business process model and notation (BPMN) and decision model and notation (DMN) can be combined for supporting intertwined aspects of decision-intensive care pathways. As a proof-of-concept, the proposed methodology has been applied to design care pathways related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in the region of Veneto, in Italy.