The Business Process Model and Notation Used for the Representation of Alzheimer’s Disease Patients Care Process

Approaches combining methods of Operational Research with Business Process Model and Notation: A systematic review

BACKGROUND

Business process modelling is increasingly used not only by the companies' management but also by scientists dealing with process models. Process modeling is seldom done without decision-making nodes, which is why operational research methods are increasingly included in the process analyses.

OBJECTIVE

This systematic literature review aimed to provide a detailed and comprehensive description of the relevant aspects of used operational research techniques in Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) model.

METHODS

The Web Of Science of Clarivate Analytics was searched for 128 studies of that used operation research techniques and business process model and notation, published in English between 1 January 2004 and 18 May 2020. The inclusion criteria were as follows: Use of Operational Research methods in conjunction with the BPMN, and is available in full-text format. Articles were not excluded based on methodological quality. The background information of the included studies, as well as specific information on the used approaches, were extracted.

RESULTS

In this research, thirty-six studies were included and considered. A total of 11 specific methods falling into the field of Operations Research have been identified, and their use in connection with the process model was described.

CONCLUSION

Operational research methods are a useful complement to BPMN process analysis. It serves not only to analyze the probability of the process, its economic and personnel demands but also for process reengineering.

Specialization of Business Process Model and Notation Applications in Medicine—A Review

Process analysis and process modeling are a current topic that extends to many areas. This trend of using optimization and modeling techniques in various specific areas has led to the question of how widespread these approaches are overall in medical specializations. We compiled a list of 272 medical disciplines that we used as a search string with the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) for a Web of Science database search. Thus, we found a total of 485 documents that we subjected to the exclusion criteria. We analyzed the remaining 108 articles using bibliometric and content analyses to find answers to three research questions. This systematic review was carried out using the procedure proposed by Kitchenham and following the Preferred Items of the Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Report (PRISMA). Due to the broad scope of the medical field, it was no surprise that for almost 85% of the sought-after medical specializations, we could not identify any publications in the given database when applying the BPMN. We analyzed the impact of upgrades to the BPMN on publishing. The keyword analysis showed a diametrical difference between the authors’ keywords and the so-called “Keywords Plus”, and we categorized the publications according to the purpose of applying the BPMN. However, the growing interest in combining BPMN with other approaches brings new challenges in practice.