Enhancing EHR Implementation with Process Mining

Abstract

Hospitals have increased the adoption of Hospital Information Systems to optimize processes for the efficient and effective delivery of services to customers (i.e., patients). However, there are still challenges in adopting information systems in healthcare, despite technological advancements and the enormous business benefits. These challenges have led to resistance of some healthcare providers to use these systems. Moreover, investigative and diagnostic measures are not exhaustively carried out to improve the processes of healthcare centers and the implemented information systems used in executing the processes. Fortunately, process mining techniques help optimize business processes, but they are primarily utilized post-implementation/post-go-live. This paper demonstrates the role process mining can play in adopting an EMR/EHR by improving the existing EHR Implementation Lifecycle by proposing an Enhanced Model. We suggest using process mining at suitable phases of the EHR Implementation lifecycle, not post-implementation/post-go-live only. Therefore, we propose an Enhanced EHR Implementation Lifecycle that supports process mining as part of a testing protocol adopted for EMRs/EHRs usability in conformance to the organization’s workflow in other implementation phases. An experiment is performed with event logs from an open-source EHR for the feasibility of the proposed Enhanced EHR/EMR implementation model.