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Process Mining for Clinical Processes: A Comparative Analysis of Four Australian Hospitals

Published: 23 January 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Business process analysis and process mining, particularly within the health care domain, remain under-utilized. Applied research that employs such techniques to routinely collected health care data enables stakeholders to empirically investigate care as it is delivered by different health providers. However, cross-organizational mining and the comparative analysis of processes present a set of unique challenges in terms of ensuring population and activity comparability, visualizing the mined models, and interpreting the results. Without addressing these issues, health providers will find it difficult to use process mining insights, and the potential benefits of evidence-based process improvement within health will remain unrealized. In this article, we present a brief introduction on the nature of health care processes, a review of process mining in health literature, and a case study conducted to explore and learn how health care data and cross-organizational comparisons with process-mining techniques may be approached. The case study applies process-mining techniques to administrative and clinical data for patients who present with chest pain symptoms at one of four public hospitals in South Australia. We demonstrate an approach that provides detailed insights into clinical (quality of patient health) and fiscal (hospital budget) pressures in the delivery of health care. We conclude by discussing the key lessons learned from our experience in conducting business process analysis and process mining based on the data from four different hospitals.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
    ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems  Volume 5, Issue 4
    Special Issue on Business Process Intelligence
    March 2015
    236 pages
    ISSN:2158-656X
    EISSN:2158-6578
    DOI:10.1145/2677016
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 23 January 2015
    Accepted: 01 April 2014
    Revised: 01 February 2014
    Received: 01 May 2013
    Published in TMIS Volume 5, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. Process mining
    2. comparative analysis
    3. data preparation
    4. health care delivery
    5. patient pathways

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    • HCF Health and Medical Research Foundation grant for the project entitled Reducing Variation in Clinical Practice: A Twin Track Approach to Support Improved Performance

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