Similarity Based Approach for Comparing Home Healthcare Processes Models in Portugal

摘要

Similarity metrics applied to business processes are used to compare and assess the similarities and differences between a set of process models. The results of this comparison can then serve as input to take management decisions, such as to prevent the proliferation of process variants. This is particularly useful in large (enterprise or governmental) organizations with multiple organizational units that share the same business processes. Examples include faculties of a university and their student enrollment process, hospitals or primary care centers of National Health Services and their medical appointment process, or even the pick and pack process across several warehouses of a large company. Due to many aspects (i.e. local policies, resources, socio-technical aspects, culture), a certain business process is individually evolved and refined across the multiple organizational units of the same organization. Organizations have then to deal with several process variants, which hampers the collection of performance indicators, optimization procedures and business process management overall. In this paper, we perform a similarity based approach to assess the similarities and differences that exist between home healthcare processes for two public primary healthcare centers in Portugal. We will achieve this by eliciting business process models according to best practices. Then, we lead a similarity based comparison between the elicited models. This is in order to show how much models are different in the same organization.