Process mining for healthcare: Characteristics and challenges.

Process mining techniques can be used to analyse business processes using the data logged during their execution. These techniques are leveraged in a wide range of domains, including healthcare, where it focuses mainly on the analysis of diagnostic, treatment, and organisational processes. Despite the huge amount of data generated in hospitals by staff and machinery involved in healthcare processes, there is no evidence of a systematic uptake of process mining beyond targeted case studies in a research context. When developing and using process mining in healthcare, distinguishing characteristics of healthcare processes such as their variability and patient-centred focus require targeted attention. Against this background, the Process-Oriented Data Science in Healthcare Alliance has been established to propagate the research and application of techniques targeting the data-driven improvement of healthcare processes. This paper, an initiative of the alliance, presents the distinguishing characteristics of the healthcare domain that need to be considered to successfully use process mining, as well as open challenges that need to be addressed by the community in the future.

Lifelong personal health data and application software via virtual machines in the cloud.

Personal Health Records (PHRs) should remain the lifelong property of patients, who should be able to show them conveniently and securely to selected caregivers and institutions. In this paper, we present MyPHRMachines, a cloud-based PHR system taking a radically new architectural solution to health record portability. In MyPHRMachines, health-related data and the application software to view and/or analyze it are separately deployed in the PHR system. After uploading their medical data to MyPHRMachines, patients can access them again from remote virtual machines that contain the right software to visualize and analyze them without any need for conversion. Patients can share their remote virtual machine session with selected caregivers, who will need only a Web browser to access the pre-loaded fragments of their lifelong PHR. We discuss a prototype of MyPHRMachines applied to two use cases, i.e., radiology image sharing and personalized medicine.