Article ID: | iaor20126341 |
Volume: | 14 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 634 |
End Page Number: | 653 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2012 |
Journal: | Manufacturing & Service Operations Management |
Authors: | Seidmann Abraham, Lahiri Atanu |
Keywords: | information |
The literature on business process design has focused on issues such as bottlenecks, workflow configuration (series versus parallel), replacing an existing workflow with a shorter one, etc. One important issue that has not received adequate attention is the information‐intensive nature of medical service systems. Performance of clinical workflows depends not only on how various steps are carried out but also on when certain information items are collected. We report the results of a long‐term empirical study that looked at the implementation of a radiology information system (RIS) at a large regional network of radiology clinics. We find that a failure to gather necessary clinical background information in earlier steps significantly delays later steps and causes them to