Towards Unsupervised Detection of Process Models in Healthcare

Process mining techniques can play a significant role in understanding healthcare processes by supporting analysis of patient records in electronic health record systems. Healthcare processes are complex and patterns of care may vary considerably within similar cohorts of patients. Process mining often creates "spaghetti" models and require significant domain expert input to refine. Machine learning approaches such as Hidden Markov Models (HMM) may assist this refinement process. HMMs have been advocated for patient pathways clustering purposes; however these models can also be utilized for detecting hidden processes to help event abstraction. We explore use of an unsupervised method for detecting hidden healthcare sub-processes using HMMs, in particular the Viterbi algorithm. We describe an approach to enrich the event log with HMM-derived states and remodeling the healthcare processes as state transitions using a process mining tool. Our method is applied to event data for 'Altered Mental Status' patients that was extracted from a US hospital database (MIMIC-III). The results are promising and show a successful reduction of model complexity and detection of several hidden processes unsupervised by a domain expert.