Process Analytics in Healthcare

As a professional in a healthcare organisation, some of the following questions might sound familiar:

• How is a healthcare process being performed in real-life?
• How to improve care pathways?
• How to improve the work organisation of nurses?
• How to make capacity estimations and facility design decisions?
• …

Recognise one or more of these questions? The research in the research line ‘Process Analytics in Healthcare’ focuses on such questions. Our team is determined to develop novel methods to answer these questions in a data-driven way.

Healthcare organisations have the ambition to provide high-quality care to their patients. At the same time, they are confronted with significant challenges such as tightening budgets, contrasted to increased care needs due to the aging population. To face these challenges, healthcare organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the need to manage their processes with the ambition to improve them.

In order to manage processes, such as the patient flow, healthcare organisations need to gain profound insights into these processes to, for instance, identify bottlenecks. These insights can be retrieved from data as increasing volumes of data are being recorded about the execution of healthcare processes. Traditionally, this data originated from the information system of the hospital. However, in the Internet of Things era, a variety of additional information sources such as real-time location systems and healthcare apps are available. This enables the retrieval of richer information to support healthcare organisations in decision-making.

The research line ‘Process Analytics in Healthcare’ focuses on conducting problem-focused, innovative research in close collaboration with academic and healthcare partners, with the ambition to develop methods which enable healthcare organisations to understand and improve their processes in a data-driven way. Over the years, we have established collaborations with a multitude of healthcare organisations in Belgium and abroad. This ensures that we remain up-to-date with the sector’s specific challenges and, at the same, makes sure that research with societal impact is conducted.

Questions about this research line or seeing the potential to collaborate? Please feel free to contact prof. dr. Niels Martin, the principal investigator of this research line.