Supporting Continuous Improvement in Care Management with BPM

The present work analyzes the results of an Italian care management project, called Leonardo, promoted by Apulia Region, in the south of Italy, in partnership with Pfizer. The work starts from the consideration that care management represents an innovation in the management of the chronic diseases because it introduces a new model in the organization of healthcare services. Such a model needs gradual refinements in a continuous improvement perspective, in order to be effective. The proposed approach is about the adoption of a Business Process Modelling technique to “model” all phases and activities of the care management process as developed in Leonardo Project. Then this model is used to define the key performance indicators, to analyze the Leonardo Project results and to enhance the underlying care management process. Specific attention has been dedicated to analyze the impact of the software proposed by Pfizer and used to support the care managers and the family doctors in the Leonardo Project. The process model, in fact, helped us to identify several limitations related to the adopted software and to formulate the correct requirements to overcome these issues. In other words, the paper aims to illustrate how tools borrowed from enterprise modelling domain can help to identify and overcome the weaknesses of a care management process and to design more effective software tools in a continuous refinement cycle.