Process Mining in Healthcare:a New Zealand Case Study • The patient’s journey through the healthcare system

can significantly affect their experience• Improving the patient journey requiresunderstanding how it is unfolding

• To do this we cannot rely on planned pathways, ashealthcare is chaotic and complex

• We need a way to look back and understand what isactually happening

• And to be able to do this in an automated andscalable way in the setting of large hospitals

• Looking at clinical “events” recorded in hospital IT systems.• And automatically generating “pathways” from these events.• This is exactly what a technology called process mining lets us do.

• We extracted anonymised event data (1048 cases, 6000 events)from Waitemata DHB IT systems (Jul 2015 - July 2018).

• The events for all patients were manually combined into a singlelog of events.

• Events included discharge from SCBU, community visits, paediatricoutpatient visits, ED presentations, and paediatric readmissions.

• The events were fed into a process mining software (Disco³)• This generated the actual pathway that those events represented• This actual pathway was then analysed and compared to theexpected pathway

• This allowed us to identify discrepancies• It also let us gauge what was happening in a complex environmentat a glance.

Improving thePatient Journey

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This was theexpected pathway.

This is the actualpathway - generatedby the process miningsoftware.

• Process mining can yield useful insights into the actualpatient journey unfolding in complex healthcare settings.

• It allows checking for conformance with expectedguidelines, discovery of inefficiencies such as bottlenecks,as well as enabling high-level exploration of what ishappening.

• However, for process mining to be a practical tool forcontinuous improvement, the extraction of events from ITsystems needs to happen in an automated way.

• Manually assembling the event log is very time-consuming• Process-aware information systems (PAIS) are ITsystems that can automate the generation of event logs.

• PAIS may be worth considering if process mining feels likethe right fit for your hospital.

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