Evaluating the Effectiveness of Interactive Process Discovery in Healthcare: A Case Study

Abstract

This work aims at investigating the effectiveness and suitability of Interactive Process Discovery, an innovative Process Mining technique, to model healthcare processes in a data-driven manner. Interactive Process Discovery allows the analyst to interactively discover the process model, exploiting his domain knowledge along with the event log. In so doing, a comparative evaluation against the traditional automated discovery techniques is carried out to assess the potential benefits that domain knowledge brings in improving both the quality and the understandability of the process model. The comparison is performed by using a real dataset from an Italian Hospital, in collaboration with the medical staff. Preliminary results show that Interactive Process Discovery allows to obtain an accurate and fully compliant with clinical guidelines process model with respect to the automated discovery techniques. Discovering an accurate and comprehensible process model is an important starting point for subsequent process analysis and improvement steps, especially in complex environments, such as healthcare.