This article is part of a collection of process mining examples organized by industry. You can find the full overview here.

When you apply process mining to a healthcare process then everything seems to be very clear: The patient ID should be the case ID, the steps are the diagnosis, treatment, or scheduling activities that took place, and the timestamps are the date and time when the activity happened.

In practice, there are quite some challenges that make things more difficult (like the process complexity that you encounter). At the same time, process mining provides many opportunities for healthcare processes, which explains why there are so many application examples from this space.

• David Baltar Boilève from the Hospital Universitario Lucus Augusti analyzed bottlenecks in the cancer diagnosis process. They presented their case here and you can find a PDF version here.

• Fran Batchelor from UW Health explains how surgical services can be analyzed with process mining. She also shared how she had to unfold data for one of her analyses to get a detailed enough view and joined our process mining café about healthcare.

• Matthew H. Loxton from WBB contributed a case study that shows how process mining can be used for Quality Improvement. They found opportunities for improvement related to data governance risks, functionality of EHR, and inconsistent use of EHR status and disposition.

• Bart van Acker from RadboudUMC saw how process mining helped to bridge the gap between process improvement professionals and the medical staff based on the example of the Intensive care unit and the Head and Neck Care chain.

• Hilda B. Klasky from Oak Ridge National Laboratory analyzed healthcare data from the Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse to discover and visualize clinical order processes like the radiology process.

• Earlier case studies show applications at the AMC in Amsterdam, the hospital of So Sebastio in Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal, and the General hospital of Chania in Greece.

• There is also a MOOC and a book about process mining in healthcare. And take a look at our overview about typical data challenges in this area as well.

Anne Rozinat

Market, customers, and everything else

• anne@fluxicon.com
• annerozinat
• @arozinat

Anne knows how to mine a process like no other. She has conducted a large number of process mining projects with companies such as Philips Healthcare, Océ, ASML, Philips Consumer Lifestyle, and many others.