Figure A.1 depicts a simplified version of the immunization tracking workflow [SKM⁺96]. The immunization tracking workflow provides us a practical application to demonstrate our implementation of the NEOWork architecture design.

Figure A.1: The immunization tracking workflow

Task T0 involves the admit clerk entering a patient’s information, typically filling out a form on the computer screen. T0 is considered a user task since the admit clerk plays an active role in the execution of the task. When sufficient customer data are collected, task T1 is performed to record the patient data into patients’ database and generate the appropriate alerts for the patient based on the data and the alert guidelines in the database. All these steps can be performed automatically by a computer application without human interaction. Therefore, T1 is an application task. On the completion of T1, the generated alerts will be displayed on the admit clerk’s screen for review and confirmation. That is Task T2. After the completion of T2, the conditions for T3 and T4 to run are satisfied. Therefore, T3 and T4 can be initiated to run simultaneously. T3 attempts to verify the patient’s medical insurance information and other confidential information while T4 goes into the database to retrieve more data and prepare to display on the next screen. The successful execution of T3 and T4 is the consequence of Task T5 to be invoked and execute. T5 is another user task which allows the admit clerk to review and update what results comes out from T3 and T4. Task T6 gets the updated data from T5 and performs the actual database update and later, a review and confirmation is needed from the admit clerk, which is Task T7. T7 concludes the execution of Admit Clerk’s workflow. Consequently, the patient’s data will be sent to nurses computer system and the Nurse’s compound task starts. The patient’s name will be added to nurse’s worklist automatically. A worklist is a list of workitems associated with a user. Each workitem is a task that belongs to a workflow being executed and that has been assigned to this user, and possibly also to others, for its completion. There might be many nurses working at the same time and each of them has her/his own worklist. They might see the patient’s name appearing on their worklist at the same time, but as long as one of them decides to take over the patient’s task, the patient’s name will be deleted from all other worklists. The nurse will examine the patient and update the patient’s medical data during the Task T8. The data will be updated to the database by Task T9 and a review is conducted in Task T10. The Nurse’s workflow ends at T10. The structure of Doctor’s compound task and Practitioner’s compound task is almost the same as the Nurse’s. For more details, see [Das97].