Assessment of the feasibility of developing a clinical pathway using a clinical order log

A clinical pathway (CP) is a tool for effectively managing a care process. There are several research efforts on developing clinical pathways (CPs) in the process mining domain. However, the nature of the data affects data analysis results, and patient clinical variability makes it challenging to develop CPs. Thus, it is crucial to determine candidate care processes that can be standardized as CPs before applying process mining techniques. This paper proposed a method for assessing CP feasibility regarding clinical complexity using clinical order logs from electronic health records. The proposed method consists of data preparation, activity & trace homogeneity evaluations, and process inspection using process mining. Each step consists of metrics to measure the homogeneity of processes and a visualization method to demonstrate the diversity of processes based on the log. The case study was conducted with five surgical groups of patients from a tertiary hospital in South Korea to validate the proposed method. The five groups of patients were successfully assessed. In addition, the visualization methods helped clinical experts grasp the diversity of care processes.