Workflow management systems for guideline implementation.

The activities of care providers need to be coordinated within a process properly designed on the basis of available best practice medical knowledge. It requires a rethinking of the management of care processes within health-care organisations. The current workflow technology seems to offer the most convenient solution to build such cooperative systems. However, some of its present weaknesses still require an intense research effort to find solutions allowing its exploitation in real medical practice. This paper presents an approach to design and build evidence-based workflow management systems (WfMS). They can be viewed as components of a knowledge management infrastructure each health care organisation should be provided with, to increase its performance in delivering high-quality care, by efficiently exploiting the available knowledge resources. On the basis of a general methodology, we describe a WfMS implementation in the area of Stroke management; such a system, after intensive testing in our research laboratory, is now in the process of being transferred in a real working setting (a stroke unit) and integrated with an existing electronic patient record.