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BPM-driven Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud in Healthcare: National Health IT Week Series

Staff, Appian
October 8, 2015

This is the fourth post in the Appian National Health IT Week Series.

You may have heard of the acronym SMAC.

It stands for Social...Mobile...Analytics...Cloud.

It refers to a constellation of technologies that are convergingin such a way that the individual impact of any one technologygreatly magnifies the impact of the whole.

Think about the impact those four technologies can generate by working together. Now add one more technology: Process-aware.

It comes by many different names, the most famous of which is Business Process Management, or BPM. "Process-aware" when applied to software relates to amodel of a process, be it low level workflow, or higher level work goals, thatcan reason about the process. It is aware of a process: something to be designed, monitored for effect, and improved.

So, what does this have to do with SMAC?

Think about it this way. Ask any personon the street whichtwo technologies have come together during the last decade to change their lives? Many would list mobile and social. Very few, if any, would list analytics and cloud. And yet, it is the analytics in the cloud that makes our mobile and social lives so compelling. Without the cloud, we could not connect. Without social, we wouldn't have nearly as much reason to connect.

Increasingly there is one more technology that makes the creation of SMAC-style apps faster, cheaper, and more compelling. These are the wide variety of composition-oriented development platforms for combining, hosting, managing, and optimizing SMAC-style apps. From a purely healthcare and health IT point of view, the most immediately relevant and accessible of these are modern BPMapplication platforms.

BPM application platforms today allow programmers and non-programmers alike to quickly compose applications throughprocess models. These process models can incorporate social user interfaces and run native across diverse mobile devices, and then easily generate ad hoc reports useful for systematically improving user experience. Oh yes, by the way, it all can happen in the cloud.

So, you can see, the route to SMAC-style applications in healthcare runs through the very technology this entire five-part series focuses on: the modern process-aware Business Process Management health IT application generating, managing, and improving platform!

More tomorrow!

Christina Fisher,Healthcare Solutions

This is the fourthpost in the Appian National Health IT Week Series. Read earlier posts here: