Enhancing Best Practices in Public Health: Using Process Patterns for Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is often perceived as a top priority concern in organisations; both in public and private sectors. Process modeling is an embedded component of most BPM initiatives, yet a resource intensive task. How process models can be derived efficiently (i.e. with less resources and time) and effectively (at a high quality to meet the specific needs) is an integral element of interest to most organisations, however, this area of research is still in its infancy. This paper aims to address this gap by proposing a 'processpattern' based approach to process modeling. The overall study design consists of an action research approach, depicting how the proposed process pattern concept has been derived and evaluated within an Australian based public health institution. The contributions from this work are twofold. From the perspective of practice, it offers a validated high level process pattern for health services management projects. From an academic perspective: it presents a validated health services process pattern which can be used as best practice or a benchmark in further research. The action research method applied within can also be reapplied to design and validate further process patterns within different contexts.