This paper uses DIAG approach in order to extract
comprehensive knowledge from patients’ pathways
within hospitals. This approach which has been
shown in figure 1 is an updated version of the pre-
vious one in (Araghi et al., 2018). It consists of seven
main functions, that could be executed through four
different states. These states are Data state, Infor-
mation state, Awareness, and Governance. The se-
ven functions in this approach would accomplish a
goal which is transforming the location data of the
patients into decisions. This approach is being de-
veloped within R.IO-DIAG application. Each state
of the approach encompasses one or several functi-
ons. The first function is the configuring the envi-
ronment and the systems. This function is concerned
with installation of location systems and importing
the primary information into the R.IO-DIAG appli-
cation. These information are: identifying zones of
the experiment, patient’s information, and functions
that could be executed in certain zones. The second
function is the location data gathering. After obtai-
ning the primary event logs (cf figure 2(a)) a series of
interpreting rules have been devised in order to extract
the corresponding activities at each zone of a hospital.
A more detailed illustration of this function is inclu-
ded within (Namaki Araghi, 2018) article. After re-
ceiving the interpreted data, the list of un-linked acti-
vities would go within the process modeling function.
Thanks to several process mining algorithms, a car-
tography of process models will be discovered and
presented by declarative modeling languages or the
OPC modeling language. These models and its me-
trics (time and distance) will be studied by the process
analyzing function. After detecting the variations of
process models, a series of cause and effect diagnoses
will be performed in the process diagnosing to extract
the cause of those variations. Finally, at prognosing
function, thanks to discrete event simulation (DES)
several scenarios will be generated for choosing the
best scenario to improve the processes.
The next section provides an overview of process
mining, RTLS and the related works. However, the
third section presents the main focus of this paper
which is on the analyzing function of DIAG appraoch,
where we aim at evaluating the capability of processes
in order to ensure the quality of services. The fourth
section evaluates and illustrates the research work by
an experiment. Finally, the last section concludes the
paper.
2 BACKGROUND
There are two problematics that motivate experts to
consider patients’ pathways as business processes.
These problematics are social and technical. Con-
cerning the social aspect, Guardian issued a study in
UK (Pinchin, 2015) based on data from 2013 that
approximately 7 million hospital appointments have
been missed due to patients being lost in the facilities
and each costs on average £108. The impact of faci-
lity design on patients’ safety is a serious issue and
is related to the distance that patients walk in the fa-
cility. Therefore, monitoring the distance traveled by
patients helps hospitals to reduce these errors. Alt-
hough, measuring the exact value is only attainable
by using proper techniques and technologies such as
RTLS.
In the context of smart healthcare, the application
of RTLS is growing rapidly as a prerequisite. These
systems consist of three main components that com-
municate with each other thanks to radio-frequency
signals. The first component is a tag which could be
attached to each object that need to be located. An-
tennas are the second component. They find the po-
sition of the tags over the location area. The third
component is a location engine. This software uses
different types of algorithms and localization techni-
ques to calculate the positions of tags. Some of these
techniques are: triangulation, trilateration, Angle of
Arrival (AOA), Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA),
and Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) (Co-
tera et al., 2016).
2.1 Process Mining
Recently, the application of process mining has been
developed in the context of healthcare (Rojas et al.,
2016) as an evidence-based methods to provide a fast,
automatic and efficient way to map the processes.
The concentration of process mining is on discove-
ring knowledge from event logs which are registered
in an information system. Nowadays, the knowledge
generated by process mining is based on three acti-
vities: process discovery, conformance checking and
enhancement of business processes (Aalst, 2016). Se-
veral researchers have defined process mining as a
practice which is being derived from the field of data
mining (Tiwari et al., 2008). However, Van der Aalst
defines process mining as a bridge between process
science and data science (Aalst, 2016). He identi-
fies that process mining and data mining both start
from data, however, data mining techniques are not
typically “process-centric”. Concerning process mi-
ning in healthcare, it mainly received attentions to-
Evaluating the Process Capability Ratio of Patients’ Pathways by the Application of Process Mining, SPC and RTLS
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