Friday, May 6, 2011

New type of profile at IHE - "Workflow Profile" and the QRPH TF

Over the past few months, the QRPH domain in IHE has been toying with the idea that we need a profile that represents more of a workflow for a particular real life use case. This has been a topic of energetic discussion for multiple face-to-face meetings.

There are possible options or profiles out there that may come to mind to help solve this idea.

Cross Enterprise Document Workflow - The description of XDW is from Keith's blog.
{The purpose of XDW is not to "automate" workflows within or even across enterprises. Instead, it's about tracking what happens, or should happen in the next few well-defined steps, and being able to look inside any "sub-workflows" initiated.}
I don't think that this is really our end goal. XDW will be great for tracking workflow, and I may actually ask ITI to rename XDW to XDWT or XDT (to have the word tracking in there) in order to avoid confusion.

Retrieve Process for Execution - RPE is a profile that uses a process definition written in BPMN and orchestrates machine execution of the process across different actors with BPEL being the underlying mechanism.
While RPE could be used to help achieve the goal of this new type of profile, it definitely feels like using a bazooka to kill a rat.

So, with some rethinking, QRPH is getting more comfortable with the idea that this new type of profile is going to be similar to the existing profile or technical framework (note that as of this blog writing, QRPH doesn't have a final text technical framework). The key here would be that the workflow profile would not create any new transactions or define any new content and instead be a Volume I definition for the workflow with potentially new actors that are grouped with existing actors in QRPH or another domain.

It is exciting to see the ideas for the QRPH technical framework coming together, and the domain starting to show signs of sprouting.

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