Introduction

Healthcare organizations need to have coordinated and systematic methodologies for business management, quality management and information management. These methodologies also support creating of a coherent business and information architectures as one of the prerequisites for achieving semantic interoperability in both the healthcare enterprises and their information and communications technology (ICT).

Healthcare is a business sector where high quality information is crucial for the quality of the services delivered. In healthcare it is critical to be able to share information between different healthcare providers regionally, nationally and sometimes also internationally. Therefore, business and information architectures should be coherent and based on standards. To achieve this, an appropriate methodology should be used for creation of such architectures.

This document describes the methodology for analysis of business and information needs of health enterprises to support standards based architectures, BIA methodology. The purpose of the methodology is to provide an efficient business and information needs analysis for an optimal healthcare enterprise description in order to create a standards based business and information architectures.

The BIA methodology starts with describing of the organization’s mission and vision.

The organization’s mission defines the type of business to be conducted and its extent. A defined business always has a purpose to state why it exists.

The business vision drives the business forward, stating the direction for streamlining and thereby development of the business.

There should be a comprehensive holistic overview that describes the current state and the target state of the business and its information management, as well as how to move from the current state to the target state, thereby allowing the vision to be more easily achieved.

The BIA methodology is used for the analysis and descriptions of a defined business. The resultant descriptions comprise the basis for decisions made for different purposes, ranging from the production of a holistic overview as a basis for the business development, information supply, ICT strategies as well as ICT requirements-setting.

The methodology consists of several steps that analyse and describe different aspects of a business. It also defines how these aspects relate to each other in order to achieve an effective and lean analysis of the business and its information needs. The analysis results in descriptions of:

— Goals - long-term, strategic, wider goal, not precisely quantifiable
— Objectives - more short-term, on operational level, specific measurable
— Stakeholders - roles/actors/target groups that directly interact in the business or have an interest that business is operative
— Concepts - the concepts that are fundamental and anchored in the business
— Process from value processing perspective - patterns for action that shall ensure that the objectives are achieved
— Process from a collaboration perspective - crystallizing of the processing perspective that shows the business roles in collaboration
— Information needs – what type of information that business roles are needed in their collaboration
— Information structure - a comprehensive and structured description of the type of information managed by the different roles in the process
— Codes, classifications and terminologies - agreed and predefined values which describe a certain type of information related to a specific attribute in the information structure

Using an established and specific for healthcare system methodology ensures that the result is fit for its purpose, maintaining quality at a high level. It also increases opportunities for comparing and re-using different analytical results as well as producing an optimal business description which can be used for different purposes.

The BIA methodology also points out a number of International Standards to use as reference models in development of the standards based coherent business and information architectures.

This document is targeted at experts working with strategic issues such as devising a business goals, objectives and strategies as well as those working with the production of industry frameworks, creating of standards based business and information architectures, business and information analyses, information structuring and requirements setting for ICT or their information supply.

PD ISO/TS 22272:2021

Health Informatics. Methodology for analysis of business and information needs of health enterprises to support standards based architectures

Current

Published:

31 Jan 2021