A Disco Approach to Process Discovery of Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) Clinical Processes

Improved clinical processes remains a main challenge for healthcare institutions, as there are numerous inefficient processes that consume high process cost and contributes very little to business profit. The study adopted the Disco process mining framework to mine the clinical processes within the Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) Department, so as to give hospital management a true picture of the actual processes that occurred in their environment, rather than the ideal picture that they assume to have occurred. Data was manually extracted from patients’ hospital files, and captured as event logs in the hard drive of the computer system. The data went through the preprocessing stage and was cleaned of every attribute that was not Case ID, time stamp, or activity. The actual running process was generated as a petrinet, which revealed that there were bottlenecks and deviations present within the event logs. This study aims to introduce process mining techniques to researchers and hospital managers, so as to make their processes more efficient.