[Process Modularization and Standardization as the Foundation for Process Digitization in the German Public Health...

The digitization of the Public Health Service in Germany still has deficits, which led to problems, not least in the context of pandemic management. To address their responsibilities, the approximately 400 German local health authorities require appropriate software equipment, which is exacerbated by the heterogeneity of the Public Health Service. Consequently, the standardization and modularization of processes represent the basis for sustainably digitizing the Public Health Service. Building on the associated process models, suitable and broadly applicable software modules can be developed and made available for diverse areas of responsibility of the public health departments. In this study, we standardize and modularize water hygiene processes of one local health authority in Berlin, Germany. Combining Design Science Research and Business Process Standardization (BPS), we identified cross-stakeholder end-to-end processes, visualized their actual states with BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), and transferred them into generalizable target states. We finally validated the results with two other local health authorities in Germany. The applied methodology and the developed artifacts can be used to scale this approach in further health departments and build the basis for developing suitable and widely applicable software components.