Process Mining in Healthcare

Healthcare providers in Germany have been facing growing challenges for some time now. Rising costs, staff shortages and increasing documentation requirements are putting clinics, practices and hospitals under pressure. One of the biggest challenges is the lack of time in day-to-day treatment. Doctors and nursing staff spend a large part of their time on administrative tasks - time that is lost in patient care. The result: long waiting times for patients and a loss of treatment quality.

‍Process Mining for the healthcare sector offers an innovative solution. The method analyses and visualizes actual processes in healthcare facilities using digital traces in IT systems, allowing optimizations to be derived. The evaluation of event logs from hospital information systems (HIS), electronic patient records (ePA) and other systems reveals inefficiencies, bottlenecks and potential for improvement.

The day-to-day running of hospitals, clinics and surgeries is characterized by inefficiencies in many respects. In emergency departments, unclear responsibilities and a lack of coordination lead to long waiting times for patients. When appointments are made, a lack of organization results in unnecessary idle times. Treatments are also often documented redundantly in different systems, which costs valuable time. Coordination between specialist departments is also unnecessarily complicated, e.g. because findings are not available or appointments for further examinations are not optimally coordinated.

Process Mining offers a systematic approach that tackles these challenges constructively. Process Mining Tools evaluate event logs from hospital information systems and other applications to uncover bottlenecks and optimization potential. Compliance management, which acts as quality control for processes and ensures compliance with legal requirements, is particularly valuable. This ensures improvements in patient safety and ensures that documentation obligations are fulfilled. Process Mining also supports the standardization of treatment procedures and the implementation of evidence-based guidelines. Process Mining also opens up opportunities for cost management in the healthcare sector. By analyzing resource management, hospitals and other facilities can identify waste and non-value-adding activities without compromising on the quality of treatment.