ProDeM: A Process-Oriented Delphi Method for systematic asynchronous and consensual surgical process modelling

Surgical process models support improving healthcare provision by facilitating communication and reasoning about processes in the medical domain. Modelling surgical processes is challenging as it requires integrating information that might be fragmented, scattered, and not process-oriented. These challenges can be faced by involving healthcare domain experts during process modelling. This paper presents ProDeM: a novel Process-Oriented Delphi Method for the systematic, asynchronous, and consensual modelling of surgical processes. ProDeM is an adaptable and flexible method that acknowledges that: (i) domain experts have busy calendars and might be geographically dispersed, and (ii) various elements of the process model need to be assessed to ensure model quality. The contribution of the paper is twofold as it outlines ProDeM, but also demonstrates its operationalisation in the context of a well-known surgical process. Besides showing the method’s feasibility in practice, we also present an evaluation of the method by the experts involved in the demonstration.