Process mining and healthcare professionals: a match made in heaven?

Hospital management are often confronted with questions such as “Why is the waiting time in the ER increasing?” or “What was the impact of our restructuring on the workload of nurses?”. All these questions can be answered by process mining, a relatively young research domain focused on the development of algorithms to gain insights in a process (e.g. a care process) using process execution data automatically recorded by information systems.

The domain of process mining in healthcare has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the uptake in practice is still rather limited. In my PhD research, I focus on two fundamental limitations in the current research, which complicate the use of process mining in a real-life healthcare context: First, there is no method to systematically map the information needs of healthcare professionals in process mining projects. Second, there is a lack of visual techniques to present process mining outcomes in an understandable way to healthcare professionals.

I will tackle both limitations by (1) introducing a new method to systematically map information needs regarding care processes among health care professionals and (2) introducing new visualization techniques to present process mining results to healthcare professionals in an insightful way.

During this presentation, I would like to give you a brief overview of what I have already done and a sneak peek of what is yet to come.

After graduating at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) as a Business Engineer in 2020, Emmelien started her joint PhD at the Data Analytics Lab (VUB) and the Research Group Business Informatics (UHasselt). In addition she is a teaching assistant for the courses ‘Research Methods for Business’ and ‘Bachelor Paper’ at VUB, her main institution.

Emmelien is researching ‘Process Mining in Healthcare’. The promotors of her joint PhD are prof. dr. Niels Martin (UHasselt) and prof. dr. Filip Van Droogenbroeck (VUB).