Blockchain-Driven Process Innovation in Healthcare Ecosystems: a Business Process Management Capabilities Analysis

The Blockchain potential in enabling and boosting business process innovation in the Healthcare industry is a hot topic. However, the realization of such a potential is hampered by two hindrances. First, healthcare business processes are inherently complex. This implies additional difficulties in managing and innovating them. Second, the digitalization trend has entailed relevant changes in the capabilities needed to manage and innovate business processes. Yet, to our best knowledge, such changes have not been empirically investigated to understand context-specific factors in driving digital innovation. Accordingly, this research aims at figuring out which may be the main Business Process Management capabilities needed to carry on Blockchain-driven Healthcare business process innovation. To fill this gap, we developed two exploratory case studies in the healthcare sector – one for probing a case of incremental business process innovation (BPI) and another one for investigating a case of radical BPI. The cases focused on the business process redesign phase of the BPM lifecycle. This working paper illustrates and discusses the preliminary results of the incremental BPI case, which concern an Italian project of Blockchain-driven innovation of the national drug logistics process. The findings suggest that the Process Portfolio Management, Process Data Governance, and Multi-purpose Process Design BPM capabilities should be prioritized. Furthermore, they highlight that a new BPM capability – Process Risk Assessment – may be strongly relevant in the healthcare context. These preliminary results integrate the BPM research stream and provide practitioners with actionable insights.