At the recent Building Business Capability 2016 conference, I presented with David Herring, who leads the Process Transformation and Decision Management Program at a large healthcare provider in Northern California, on “Pioneering Decision Services with Decision Modeling”. His organization is a large, not-for-profit health plan providing everything from inpatient, to home health, hospitals, hospice, pharmacy, and insurance. 10M+ members, 17,000 doctors and nearly 200,000 total employees.
We have been helping them with several projects, one of which is The Heart Failure Project. This is trying to give cardiologists a system to evaluate patients, using a simple set of conditions, to determine if patient needs to be referred to a heart failure specialist. This project used our standard methodology:
- Run discovery workshops involving actual business owners – heart surgeons and heart transplant specialists –to describe the decisions involved and their business context.
- Model and refine decision models in DecisionsFirst Modeler, our decision modeling software. This revealed more granular and reusable decisions as well as the input data and knowledge sources involved.
- Transform decision models into executable decision tables. As the model stabilized, decision tables were added to IBM’s Operational Decision Manager BRMS using the web-based editor and each table was linked to a specific decision in the decision model using our integration between DecisionsFirst Modeler and IBM ODM.
- Deploy an ODM Decision Service that could be called from processes or from a UI such as that used by the Doctors.
With the new approach, all the studies and research available could be combined into a single decision model. This could then be used to deploy some standard decision services, available on the enterprise infrastructure, to make decisions whenever and wherever needed.
- Decision Modeling Workshops engage business owners, reveal automation boundaries and integrate multiple perspectives and source documents
- Decision Modeling supports iterative development, focuses BRMS development and manages the automation boundary
- Decision Services improve processes and support SOA best practices
The methodology is available from Decision Management Solutions and is configured to fit with an organization’s other approaches based on experience with a decision modeling effort running in parallel. Register to receive a copy of the presentation here. Contact us for more information.
