Pjm Bakker

Application of Process Mining in Healthcare – A Case Study in a Dutch Hospital

To gain competitive advantage, hospitals try to streamline their processes. In order to do so, it is essential to have an accurate view of the “careflows” under consideration. In this paper, we apply process mining techniques to obtain meaningful knowledge about these flows, e.g., to discover typical paths followed by particular groups of patients. This is a non-trivial task given the dynamic nature of healthcare processes. The paper demonstrates the applicability of process mining using a real case of a gynecological oncology process in a Dutch hospital. Using a variety of process mining techniques, we analyzed the healthcare process from three different perspectives: (1) the control flow perspective, (2) the organizational perspective and (3) the performance perspective. In order to do so we extracted relevant event logs from the hospital’s information system and analyzed these logs using the ProM framework. The results show that process mining can be used to provide new insights that facilitate the improvement of existing careflows.

From Requirements via Colored Workflow Nets to an Implementation in Several Workflow Systems

Hospitals and other healthcare organizations need to support complex and dynamic workflows. Moreover, these processes typically invoke a number of medical disciplines. This makes it important to avoid the typical disconnect between requirements and the actual implementation of the system. In this paper we apply a development approach where an Executable Use Case (EUC) and a Colored Workflow Net (CWN) are used to close the gap between a given requirements specification and the realization of these requirements based on workflow technology. In order to do so, we describe a large case study where the diagnostic process of the gynecological oncology care process of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) hospital is used as a candidate process. The process consists of hundreds of activities. These have been modeled and analyzed using an EUC and a CWN. Moreover, based on the CWN, the process has been implemented using four different workflow systems. In this way, we demonstrate the general application of the approach and its applicability to distinct technology systems.

Flexibility Schemes for Workflow Management Systems

Currently, many hospitals are investigating the use of workflow management systems in order to provide support for healthcare processes. However, contemporary workflow management systems fall short in supporting care processes which require flexible execution options. In this paper, we investigate the flexibility requirements that need to be satisfied in order to support various kinds of healthcare processes Our evaluation shows that different systems need to be used in conjunction with each other in order to fully support the various types of care processes.

Process-Aware Information System Development for the Healthcare Domain - Consistency, Reliability, and Effectiveness

Optimal support for complex healthcare processes cannot be provided by a single out-of-the-box Process-Aware Information System and necessitates the construction of customized applications based on these systems. In order to allow for the seamless integration of the new technology into the existing operational processes of a healthcare organization, ensuring the correct operation and reliability of the developed system are of the utmost importance. This paper proposes an approach in which the same model is used for specifying, developing, testing and validating the operational performance of a new system. The benefits of using the same model for different purposes are decreased potential for loss of user requirements and increased confidence in reliability and correct operation of the resultant system before its deployment. This approach has been applied to a schedule-based workflow system developed for the AMC hospital in Amsterdam.