Press Room

New HL7 BPM Community closer to the mainstream health IT industry

BOSTON, MA/ANN ARBOR, MICH. – JUNE 25, 2024 – Today, globally recognized standards development group Object Management Group® (OMG®) and leading standards-development organization Health Level Seven International (HL7®) announce the transition of OMG’s BPM+ Health® Community into the HL7 family as the HL7 BPM Community. Established in 2019 under OMG, the BPM+ Health Community was created to advance sharable workflows, processes, and care practices across sites and settings of care through the leveraged use of open standards and formal notations. The move into HL7 was made as an evolutionary step closer to the center of the mainstream of the health sector.

OMG’s Business Process Management® (BPM®) is a discipline focused on capturing, documenting, and applying models to promulgate workflow processes, which may also address opportunities for process automation, often integrating human-performed and automated tasks. It represents processes in visual languages that are understandable to both people and machines. It is solid in its ability to represent complex activities, providing enhanced transparency into processes underway, improving discovery of activities not performed, and managing status as activities progress under the guidance of an intended workflow.

“We are delighted to welcome BPM+ Health as part of the HL7 International community, where industry stakeholders convene to solve real-world challenges in global health data interoperability,” said Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D., HL7 CEO. “Adding this dedicated group of experts will further bolster the advancement of HL7 FHIR and our implementation process. Moreover, it will support our vision of a world where everyone can securely access and use the right data when and where they need it.”

“Healthcare requires care traffic control systems that use best practices to deliver quality outcomes. To solve these challenges, our community applies closed-loop, process automation standards to ease the burden of clinical and patient-focused workflows,” said Shane McNamee, MD, and co-lead of the community. “The resulting models better reflect business needs, and thus accelerate learning health systems.”

Ken Rubin, Senior Advisor for Standards and Interoperability for the US Department of Veterans Affairs is active and holds leadership roles in HL7 and BPM+ Health.  “Having the BPM+ Health Community join forces under the HL7 umbrella is a big step for us. Process modeling naturally depends on HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) for data, and BPM+ Health complements major activities within HL7. Moreover, with its unparalleled reputation and reach as a global center for health interoperability, joining forces under the HL7 banner made sense.”

With the BPM+ Health Community coming under HL7 governance, the work is ideally positioned to advance FHIR synergies, align with HL7 FHIR Accelerator programs, and better meet the challenges most affecting healthcare process interoperability. The coming months will focus on those synergies and operationally integrating into HL7, with work continuing to discover and publish best practices for authoring workflow models, workflow implementations in concert with FHIR, and adoption guidance to help institutions take advantage of this approach.

The BPM+ Health Community was initially established to take on several key challenges facing healthcare delivery institutions, namely:

• Advance techniques to promote consistency in care delivery within healthcare delivery organizations across settings of care
• Foster a seamless patient care experience, even when that care spans institutions or care settings
• Improve organizational agility to adopt and deploy changing and emerging care practices
• Leverage commercial tooling and open standards in widespread use in many verticals but not well adopted within the health sector

“A key part of what OMG does is bring communities together, and we are proud to have helped the BPM+ Health Community get their start and nurture them to this point,” said Bill Hoffman, Chairman and CEO of OMG. “The BPM+ Health Community believed that moving closer to the mainstream health IT industry was needed to maximize their impact, and we were happy to support that direction. We have enjoyed a long-standing, very positive relationship with HL7 and look forward to that continuing.”

Denis Gagne, CEO and CTO of Trisotech and one of the participants at the initial exploratory workshop on this topic eight years ago, said, “I am ecstatic that the BPM+ Health Community is now part of HL7. This significant step forward presents an outstanding opportunity to enhance healthcare interoperability and advance the field of healthcare orchestration.”

Access HL7’s BPM Community website here:  http://bpm.hl7.org

For the remainder of 2024, HL7’s BPM Community Membership is included with HL7 membership.
Join here: http://www.hl7.org/participate/membership/index.cfm?ref=nav

About HL7
Health Level Seven® International (HL7®) is an ANSI-accredited, not-for-profit standards-developing organization with the mission of empowering global health interoperability. With affiliates in over 30 countries, HL7’s global membership envisions a world where everyone can securely access and use the right data when and where needed. Widely implemented by vendor and healthcare systems and required by governing bodies around the world, HL7 standards deliver solutions for health information technology, including HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®), Version 2 (V2), and Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®). For more information, visit HL7.org. www.HL7.org.

About OMG
When tech organizations, governments, and academia need to solve discrete pieces of a technology puzzle or discuss matters of common interest, they often seek to join or form a consortium. Since 1989, Object Management Group® (OMG®) has created and nurtured a productive community with common technology interests and problems to resolve. OMG communities include Augmented Reality Enterprise Alliance (AREA), BPM+ Health, Consortium for Information and Software Quality™ (CISQ™), Digital Twin Consortium® (DTC), Industry IoT Consortium® (IIC™), OMG Standards Development Organization (SDO®), and Responsible Computing (RC™). OMG is global, not-for-profit, and vendor neutral. Visit OMG.

Object Management Group and OMG are registered trademarks of the Object Management Group. For a listing of all OMG trademarks, visit https://www.omg.org/legal/. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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