Methodological Framework for Analyzing Emergency Department Processes Using Process Mining

Abstract

The emergency department is critical in the hospital, presents a high complexity due to the admissions of patients with a wide variety of diseases and different urgent cases, which brings about different problems, such as overcrowding and the extension of waiting times. Thus, enhancing the processes of the emergency department not only improves service quality and patient satisfaction but also reduces service costs. Process mining aims at an automatic extraction of process knowledge from event logs recorded by information systems. This study aims to introduce a methodological framework for analyzing emergency department processes using process mining techniques. It is an extension and based on previous methods, with the additional phases that suit the complexity of the emergency environment, as well as involved the stakeholder in most methodology phases. This helped in understanding the high variance of patients’ pathways taken by diverse groups of patients, and gaining insights about bottlenecks and resource utilization. Therefore, that leads to improving the processes. The proposed methodological framework is applied to a case study at 22 May public hospital for cholera patients’ emergency rescue processes to validate the proposed method. The case study demonstrated that the proposed methodological framework can be used efficiently and effectively to analyze emergency department processes, identifying the most important deviations, overcrowding, places of delay, opportunities, and suggestions for improving processes, and gaining a better understanding of different patients’ pathways.