Extracting clinical-event-packages from billing data for clinical pathway mining

Abstract

Clinical pathway can be used to reduce medical cost and improve medical efficiency. Traditionally, clinical pathways are designed by experts based on their experience. However, it is time consuming and sometimes not adaptive for specific hospitals, and mining clinical pathways from historic data can be helpful. Clinical pathway naturally can be regarded as a kind of process, and process mining can be used for clinical pathway mining. However, due to the complexity and dynamic of medical behaviors, traditional process mining methods often generate spaghetti-like clinical pathways with too many nodes and edges. To reduce the number of nodes in the resulting models, we put correlated events into clinical-event-packages as new units of log event for further mining. The experiment results has shown that our approach is a good way of generating more comprehensible clinical process as well as packages with better quality according to medical practitioners.