At runtime, I need to be able to check if a process instance is active with a specific folio (not necessarily assigned to the current user). At minimum, a true/false response is enough. Is there a way I can query for this in an efficient manner using system smartobjects?

Note: Calling a list method to return all process instances for a workflow and filtering is not an option since this specific workflow would have thousands of active instances and filtering on the result set is very inefficient.