Business Process Re-engineering and Automation in Health Field: A Case of Medical Equipment Evaluation

With the great diversity of the existing medical equipment, the choice of the appropriate equipment became a more challenging task. Therefore, medical facilities usually evaluate any medical equipment before the purchasing process, to ensure its appropriateness. However, the medical equipment evaluation process is both time and resource consuming, therefore, different contributions had been made to improve this process. This paper aims to improve the medical equipment evaluation process using the business process re-engineering and automation techniques. First, the study presents the current As-Is business process using business process modeling notations, and then draw its weaknesses using simulation technique and value-added analysis. After that, it suggests the To-Be business process involving four re-engineering heuristics: task elimination, parallelism, communication optimization, and automation. Finally, to assess the performance of the To-Be business process, it was implemented using the automation feature in Bizagi Studio. After comparing the proposed To-Be to the As-Is business processes, it found that the proposed To-Be saved 34 % of the total time consumed by the As-Is process. While in terms of resources, the proposed To-Be decreased the number of employees involved in the process, as one employee was completely dropped from the process. Moreover, it minimized the number of tasks by 16.7 %. Overall, the proposed To-Be medical equipment evaluation business process in this study, outperformed the current As-Is business processes.