Literature study (part 2)

It has been a very long time since I posted an update, but that has to do with the exams. Hopefully I passed all exams now (I really think so) and I can start focusing on my literature study. What have I been doing so far this first week? I read some general (background) papers and I searched for some more specific papers. The search key I have been using is based on the question: Is BPMN2.0 the right modeling tool for creating reference models (in the health care domain)? This question is not the research question, but will be closely related to it. I don’t have a final version of my research question(s) yet. As soon as I have formulated them, I will post them so anybody can take a look at it and provide me with some feedback.

 The search keys I have been using are:

• "BPMN" and "Care pathway"
• "Care pathway" and "reference model"
• "BPMN" and "Reference model" and ["Healthcare" or "Health care"]
• "Process" and "reference model" and "health care"

The result is some useful papers (which I only skimmed so far). Hopefully these papers are a good start to carry on and to make the literature list more extensive.

As you can see by the search key I used, I focused on care pathways and health care. I don’t really have a good reason for that, except that my mentor’s (Pieter Van Gorp) focus is on health care. As mentioned before in one of my previous posts, this research can also be applied into different fields. On the other hand, it is recommended to focus on one domain, otherwise it is not possible to see the wood for the trees. The health care domain is then chosen because this is of my interest and that of Pieter.

Another thing to highlight is how I do my literature study. There is a very nice tool called Qiqqa. With this tool it is possible to highlight sentences, create tags, and make annotations, and when you are done reading, you can make an annotation report, which is some kind of summary and will save you a lot of time. Another create feature is that you don’t have to type in all the details about the paper, but it does this for you by searching in Google Scholar. You then can export your list of used papers to word, by one click and everything stated correctly. It also links papers to other papers in your own database. This database is available online, so you can work where ever you want (e.g. train) or at home and at your company. This and many more functions, and all for FREE! If you are interested, please use this link to register and you will receive a premium account for two weeks (after that you will be downgraded to a normal account, but this still has plenty of options (all options I’ve mentioned above))

Besides all this playing with Qiqqa, I managed to make a planning (I set quite a challenging deadline for myself: begin September 2012). The planning for the literature study is quite elaborated and for the rest of the phases this has yet to come. The planning is based on the paper by Vanwersch et al (2011) [1] and consists of 6 steps (see attached planning or see paper).

Planning (literature study only)

[1] R J B Vanwersch, K Shazad, K Vanhaecht, P W P J Grefen, L M Pintelon, J Mendling, G G van Merode, H A Reijers - Methodological support for business process redesign in health care: a literature review protocol. International Journal of Care Pathways 2011, 15, 119-126

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