Process mining in oncology: A literature review

Abstract

Abstract-Process mining, an emerging data analytics method, has been used effectively in various healthcare contexts including oncology, the study of cancer. Cancer is a complex disease with many complicated care requirements and there is an urgent need to improve the cost and clinical effectiveness of cancer care pathways. Process mining of the e-health records of cancer patients may play an important future role and this paper presents a literature review of process mining in oncology as a contribution to this research. The search produced 758 articles which were manually reviewed by title, abstract, and full paper text review to develop the original pool of papers. An in-depth ancestor search was used to gather additional articles from the references of the original pool. These steps resulted in 37 papers. Through a thematic review process, the papers were analysed and five themes emerged. These were: 1) process and data types; 2) research questions; 3) techniques, perspectives and tools; 4) methodologies; 5) limitations and future work. This review can: (i) highlight the potential value of process mining for improving cancer care processes (ii) provide a useful overview of the current work undertaken; (iii) help researchers to choose process mining algorithms, techniques, tools, methodologies and approaches; and (iv) identify research opportunities in this new field of study.

Process mining routinely collected electronic health records to define real-life clinical pathways during chemotherapy

“…Our review of the process mining literature identified 37 peer reviewed papers using electronic health record (EHR) data to map pathways in oncology (11). Challenges included the difficulty of capturing outpatient events (12), the use of data collected for non-clinical purposes, missing data and clinically inaccurate time-stamps (13).…”

Clinical pathway modelling: a literature review

“…Of the 27 review papers in Table A2 (Appendix II), six consider process mining or data mining [38,63,78,109,135,168], seven consider simulation [2,105,132,173,175,176,208] and three consider stochastic modelling [59,123,213].…”

“…There are seven papers that use the term 'clinical pathway', or its synonyms, in the search terms [61,63,132,156,173,175,189] and two papers use 'patient flow' in their search terms [109,173]. These papers all consider clinical pathways, but most focus on a different primary topic.…”

A Multi-level Approach for Identifying Process Change in Cancer Pathways

“…Our case study examined process data related to the treatment of endometrial cancer over a 15 year period (2003-2017) in one of the UK's largest cancer centres (Leeds Cancer Centre) with a specific focus on the routes to diagnosis. Process mining has been used and shown promising results to support process analytics in Oncology [8]. Our event logs were drawn from the Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) system of Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust.…”