Automated discovery of care pathways in primary care
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Can process mining automatically determine care pathways of patients with hypertension OR type 2 diabetes in UK primary care?: A comparative assessment
IRAS ID
236796
Contact name
IJ Litchfield
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Birmingham
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 29 days
Research summary
In the UK primary care is seen as the optimal context for delivering care to an ageing population with a growing number of long term conditions. However, if it is to meet these demands effectively and efficiently, a more precise understanding of existing care processes is required to ensure their configuration is based on robust evidence. This need to understand and optimise organisational performance is not unique to healthcare, and in industries such as telecommunications or finance, a methodology known as “Process Mining” has become an established and successful method to identify how an organisation can best deploy resources to meet the needs of its clients and customers. Here and for the first time in the UK we will apply it to primary care settings to gain a greater understanding of how patients with hypertension are managed.
The study will be conducted in three phases; first we will use the data held on the clinical management system of four practices of varying characteristics in the West Midlands to determine how each interacts with patients with Hypertension. Second, we will use traditional process mapping exercises at each practice to manually produce maps of care processes for the selected condition. Third, with the aid of staff and patients at each practice we will compare and contrast the process models produced by process mining with the process maps produced via manual techniques, review differences and similarities between them and the relative importance of each.
Having refined the automated production of maps of care processes we can explore pinch points and bottlenecks, process variants and unexpected behaviour, and make informed recommendations to improve the quality and efficiency of care.
REC name
East Midlands - Leicester South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/EM/0284
Date of REC Opinion
20 Sep 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion