How a care flow is built
The building blocks assembled in Awell Studio: tracks with triggers, steps joined by transitions, and actions assigned to the people who carry them out.
Designing a care flow means arranging tracks, steps, and actions. Key terms has the short definitions; this page explains the shape they make together.
Tracks and steps organize; actions carry the work
Tracks, activated by triggers
A track is a phase of the care flow. Tracks are declarative: rather than being called in order, each one activates in response to a trigger.
That differs from a flowchart: the author describes the conditions under which a phase should begin, and the engine decides when that's true.
Steps, joined by transitions
Inside a track, steps are connected by transitions. This part is familiar to anyone who has used a flowchart tool: boxes on a canvas, arrows between them.
A transition can carry conditions, so the path through a track depends on what happened earlier.
Actions, assigned to stakeholders
An action is the most granular block. It defines what needs to happen, and who does it.
Some actions need a person (a form to complete, a message to read). Others the system does by itself (a calculation, an API call).
Why care flows don't look like standard process diagrams
Awell deliberately departs from the way business processes are usually modeled. Healthcare processes aren't factory workflows: they run for years, repeat, overlap, and branch on clinical judgment, so the building blocks above are a visual modeling language built for care.
Anyone who has worked with business process model and notation, or BPMN, will find that the concepts map loosely rather than exactly.
Next steps
Next: What happens when a care flow runs — how these blocks turn into activities once a patient is enrolled.
Key terms
The Awell vocabulary: care flow, track, step, action, data point, variable, and activity, defined once and used consistently across these docs.
What happens when a care flow runs
How a designed care flow becomes activities once a patient is enrolled: and why activities, not steps, are what to read, query, and build integrations against.