A systematic methodology for outpatient process analysis based on process mining

Abstract

Healthcare industry is competitive due to the increase in demand for medical services caused by population aging and improved standards of living. In accordance with this trend, there have been several studies investigating how clinical processes can be improved such as decreasing the waiting time for consultation, optimizing reservation systems, etc. To improve clinical processes in hospitals, understanding current situations and identifying problems are critical. In this paper, a method to analyze outpatient processes based on process mining is suggested. Process mining aims at extracting knowledgeable information from event logs. The proposed methodology consists of data integration, data exploration, data analysis, and discussion steps. In the data analysis, process discovery and matching rate analysis, process pattern analysis and what-if analysis based on performance analysis are conducted by applying several process mining techniques. To validate the proposed method, a case study is conducted with a tertiary general university hospital in Korea.