Abstract:
Healthcare pathways define the execution sequence of clinical activities as patients move through a treatment process, and they are critical for maintaining quality of care and improving health outcome for all patients. Past studies show that there is potential for informative healthcare pathways to be extracted from hospital health records, but there is currently no consensus on a systematic healthcare pathway mining method that supports explicit design and conformance analysis of concise and comprehensible healthcare pathway models. This study investigates the utilization of business process modelling methods to design a process mining pipeline for healthcare pathway discovery, conformance analysis and enrichment using hospital records. The process mining pipeline is designed with emphasis on producing pathway models that are concise and easy to interpret for clinicians without a sufficient background in process mining. The proposed process mining pipeline is applied to an appendicitis and cholecystitis case study as an example of a simple pathway, and an ambulatory cardiac care case study as an example of a complex pathway. Results from the two case studies indicate that the proposed pipeline designed with business process mining tools is effective for healthcare pathways of different levels of complexity. The produced healthcare pathway models are easy for clinical interpretation and provide an unbiased overview of real patient movements through the treatment process. Preliminary analysis on building machine learning models to predict post-operation length of stay in hospital, using information extracted by the process mining pipeline, is showing promising results. This means that the proposed mining pipeline also has the potential to support the development of machine learning models to further relate healthcare pathways to performance indicators such as readmission rates and mortality rates. This study establishes the use of business process modelling methods for the improvement of healthcare pathway mining methods, and there is value in investigating the capabilities of other business process mining tools for healthcare pathway mining purposes.