Clinical Guidelines: A Crossroad of Many Research Areas. Challenges and Opportunities in Process Mining for Healthcare

Abstract

Clinical Guidelines, medical protocols, and other healthcare indications, cover a significant slice of physicians daily routine, as they are used to support clinical choices also with relevant legal implications. On the one hand, informatics have proved to be a valuable mean for providing formalisms, methods, and approaches to extend clinical guidelines for better supporting the work performed in the healthcare domain. On the other hand, due to the different perspectives that can be considered for addressing similar problems, it lead to an undeniable fragmentation of the field. It may be argued that such fragmentation did not help to propose a practical, accepted, and extensively adopted solutions to assist physicians. As in Process Mining as a general field, Process Mining for Healthcare inherits the requirement of Conformance Checking. Conformance Checking aims to measure the adherence of a particular (discovered or known) process with a given set of data, or vice-versa. Due to the intuitive similarities in terms of challenges and problems to be faced between conformance checking and clinical guidelines, one may be tempted to expect that the fragmentation issue will naturally arise also in the conformance checking field. This position paper is a first step on the direction to embrace experience, lessons learnt, paradigms, and formalisms globally derived from the clinical guidelines challenge. We argue that such new focus, joint with the even growing notoriety and interest in PM4HC, might allow more physicians to make the big jump from user to protagonist becoming more motivated and proactive in building a strong multidisciplinary community.