Treatment pathways as petri nets in patient workflow management

The healthcare market demands more advanced and flexible solutions to provide better care for patients. Moving medical services closer to patients improves the quality of healthcare but brings, at the same time, new challenges. It requires a well-functioning, decentralized infrastructure and better workflow support for health personnel. Therefore, we need to provide consistency for this type of services with patient data accessed and processed by several healthcare stakeholders.
In the paper, we present how Petri net-based workflow technology can be used to design flexible treatment pathways, and to coordinate the treatment process in a distributed way among several healthcare workers. We have implemented a system that supports consistency for distributed healthcare and integrates the treatment workflows into a healthcare workflow system. We use a clinical health care example to illustrate the workflow.