An Engineering Method to Evaluate Care Processes and Introduce Televisits

During past years, the pandemic has revealed the importance of having a solid care system prepared to face emergencies. In this context, digital solutions demonstrated a high potential in dealing with critical conditions and ensuring the delivery of care. However, telemedicine has not yet succeeded in becoming a stable part of ordinary care. The integration of innovative telemedicine technologies with a set of well-organized activities plays a crucial role in the release of high-quality services. Processes modeling before the introduction of telemedicine services is a leverage to prepare the base for an effective and efficient shift to digital care. Hence, the present research customizes a modeling technique in four steps for a preliminary analysis of processes where to introduce televisits. A special attention is given to the collection of consistent knowledge about care processes, often lack and incomplete in public hospitals scenarios. The approach has been applied to the AS-IS process of the heart failure clinic of a large Italian hospital before the introduction of televisits. Integrated Definition for Function Modeling (IDEF) diagrams have allowed the hierarchical decomposition of complex phases in simpler tasks, the acquisition of consciousness and the updating of information. Diagrams have been created and used as a source of a common language to discuss about weaknesses of the current process and its possible improvements. Obstacles to the upcoming televisits services have been objectively highlighted, such as the need to reduce employed applications, the removal of printed material and the streamlining of unnecessary operations.