The PATMAN project aims at promoting an effective and efficient health care delivery by facilitating physicians to cope with both medical and organisational issues during patients management. As a matter of fact, the quality of the delivered care is more and more dependent not only on the physicians' skill, but also on the degree of collaboration and communication among health care operators. A major objective of this project is to demonstrate that health care organisations could benefit by exploiting the concept of workflow management, as many industrial and commercial organisations do. A workflow management system in general enhances efficiency. However, in health care environments we have to be aware that the primary goal of every program or action is the improvement of the quantity and/or the quality of life of the patient or, in general, of the population. For that reason, we propose a workflow management system built on top of clinical practice guidelines and protocols, that represent a guarantee about quality of care, being developed by leading expert in the different medical fields.
The project will consist of the following steps:

1. development of a representation formalism for clinical guidelines and protocols, able to capture the medical knowledge

2. development of a tool for embedding, into the previously represented guideline/protocol, the organisational knowledge necessary to carry on the tasks into the specific health care environment

3. evaluation of the impact of these tools on some hospital organisation