Applying Process Mining to Healthcare Processes

Applying Process Mining to Healthcare Processes

Process Mining, being fairly new to the market, has already shown remarkable growth and produced promising results for companies that are invariably dependent on systematic and efficient processes. While PM is an efficient tool in bridging the gap between what you do Vs. what you can actually do, it can also help businesses see where there is scope for improvement and helps assess process variants to attain better results.

Why Process Mining for Healthcare?

Because healthcare processes are becoming more dynamic, intricate, and multifaceted, PM is an excellent fit. Healthcare processes are also great candidates for PM because of their time-sensitive and process-oriented nature.

Outside of the healthcare industry, research into this topic is providing significant insights into how PM may optimize essential operations, such as reducing time or costs for a certain procedure. The requirement to maximize the possibility of excellent health outcomes through an effective process of care is why PM is detrimental to the success of hospitals.

Hospitals strive to streamline their processes in order to provide a higher level of care at reasonable rates. It’s crucial to have a clear picture of the “care flows” in question in order to do so, PM helps achieve this by identifying areas that can be optimized in the care process. The care process involves:

• Gathering both subjective and empirical data on the patient.
• Analyzing the data to find problems
• Estimating the effectiveness of present treatments and setting priorities
• Putting together an evidence-based and cost-effective customized care plan
• Putting the respective care plan into action
• Observing the patient overtime at follow-up visits in order to assess the plan’s success and make any changes.

Setting standards in health care is well known for encouraging providers to approach patient care in a consistent manner. Systematically adopting a care framework that is consistently used ensures that no key steps are missed and that behaviors that may cause more harm than good are minimized or eliminated.

The structure is necessary to preserve consistency in a continuously changing environment. Care pathways and standard order sets are examples of standardized care processes that have been utilized for many years in the hospital setting. The goal of developing a standardized patient care process is not to reinvent the wheel, but to establish a shared framework.

Therefore, process mining tools help standardize care processes to obtain consistent patient outcomes while being able to analyze patient journeys from start to finish and reduce delays in the process.

How does the application of PM techniques help improve health care processes?

Doctors, nurses, technicians, and other key members of the healthcare team are faced with making life-saving decisions on a daily basis. The pandemic has highlighted the need of having timely access to data for making judgments.

Most existing platforms, such as basic Business Intelligence tools, can monitor operations and performance, but they can’t identify the causes of underperforming processes or provide predictive analysis.

Process mining tries to extract process knowledge from event logs, which can come from a variety of sources, including enterprise information systems and hospital information systems. These event logs typically contain information on the start/stop of process stages, as well as relevant context data.

Because healthcare processes are characterized by the involvement of multiple organizational units in the treatment of patients, and because these organizational units frequently have their own specific IT applications, it is clear that obtaining data related to healthcare processes is a difficult task.

Despite this, hospital systems must give an integrated view of all these IT applications in order to ensure that the hospital is compensated for each service provided to a patient. As a result, these types of systems contain process-related information regarding healthcare procedures, making them a promising candidate for supplying the data required for process mining.

Key areas PM benefits healthcare processes:

Since hospital information systems usually have all the data related to a patient’s treatment journey, it is comparatively easier to assess and keep track of the events that have transacted in real-time through process Mining tools. This would include the caseID, activity, and time stamp.

Here are a few benefits of employing PM to healthcare processes:

• Optimizing patient flow entails satisfying demand for care quickly, efficiently, and effectively by moving patients through care pathways while enhancing care coordination, patient safety, and health outcomes. By properly matching the appropriate amount of resources to each of their admissions, Process Mining technologies can assist in the tracking of patient admissions and transfers.
• Patient flow is most commonly connected with hospitals, particularly with emergency department back-ups and overcrowding, as well as inadequate scheduling in surgery departments. In hospitals, poorly managed patient flow can result in negative health outcomes, increasing mortality rates, and readmissions.
• One of the main hindrances of hospital information systems is that each department or medical unit has its own tracking tool and process, which might fuel discrepancies in the overall care flow process. In this regard, Process Mining helps track the flow analysis across different departments and medical units as well.
• Another detrimental aspect that can impact patient claims is Revenue Cycle Management. An efficient billing process has the ability to improve patient inflows by a great margin, PM can help give a bird’s-eye view of where exactly discrepancies lie, allowing you to evaluate and implement process improvements where necessary.
• Process mining technologies can also be used to assess and monitor patient efficacy and treatment compliance, ensuring that the increasing field of telehealth is understood, tracked, and quantified in relation to onsite care.
• PM helps keep an eye out for processes that fail to follow a set pattern. This can also generate different impacts on patient care results across different locations and healthcare providers.
• Process mining can help improve patient care procedures and efficacies by offering executive-level visibility into all key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to the desired results and driving performance.
• You can also aim to support value-based pricing and compensation due to PM’s ability to generate large amounts of data from previous event logs. In addition to that, it also helps optimize costs by implementing automation in the process flow.

Why You Should Implement Process Mining to Improve Care Processes:

• Reduce the length of time that patients spend in the hospital
• Eliminate rework
• Predict payments that are likely to be denied in advance
• Adjust your payment collection automatically when needed
• Achieve Increased revenue and  positive working capital

Therefore, employing process mining to enhance care flow can be of great benefit as it entails a myriad of opportunities in terms of, reducing costs, compliance conformance, improving quality of patient care, building a competent workforce, standardizing, and streamlining operational activities. With a sustainable and efficient PM tool, you can now streamline all your operating processes to achieve higher revenue, market growth and customer satisfaction!