Publikation
Process Mining for Healthcare: Discover Beyond Discovery
Joscha Grüger
PhD-Thesis, Universität Trier, 2024.
Zusammenfassung
Process mining, a nascent interdisciplinary field at the crossroads of process science and data science, harnesses specialized algorithms to glean insights from event logs, primarily derived from various organizational information systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This facilitates a thorough and objective analysis of process performance, which encompasses the identification of bottlenecks, deviations, and inefficiencies. Additionally, it supports the discovery of process models, the verification of conformance in real-world process executions, and the prediction of future process behaviors.
This dissertation delves into advancing process mining within healthcare, a sector characterized by its intricate and dynamic nature of the processes. It aims to move beyond process discovery by addressing some of the field’s most pressing challenges. The dissertation is methodologically grounded in the Design Science Research (DSR), which emphasizes a problem-solving orientation. Through this framework, it covers four key research areas, each aimed at tackling specific challenges within the field of process mining for healthcare.
The first research area of this dissertation addresses the identification of actual process-related problems in healthcare settings from the perspective of healthcare professionals. It aims to move from a predominantly technical, academic perspective to a more practical, problem-oriented approach. The second research area tackles the significant hurdle of data availability in process mining projects in the healthcare sector. It proposes an approach to generate high-quality synthetic process data that balances control-flow and data perspectives. The third area focuses on the topic of guideline conformance checking. The dissertation proposes several approaches for guideline conformance checking addressing specific healthcare problems, such as the flexibility of medical processes or the transformation of guidelines into process models. The last research area focuses on process visualization, by emphasizing a customizable process visualization framework that adapts to varying hospital contexts and user needs.
The dissertation is divided into a framework paper and main contributions. The framework paper structures the four research areas into a coherent discussion that spans across the chapters, covering the current state of the art, research methodologies, and key findings, concluding with future directions. The main contributions are then explained in detail in chapters P1 to P8.