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.

Privacy-Preserving Process Mining in Healthcare.

Process mining has been successfully applied in the healthcare domain and has helped touncover various insights for improving healthcare processes. While the benefits of process miningare widely acknowledged, many people rightfully have concerns about irresponsible uses of personaldata. Healthcare information systems contain highly sensitive information and healthcare regulationsoften require protection of data privacy. The need to comply with strict privacy requirements mayresult in a decreased data utility for analysis. Until recently, data privacy issues did not get muchattention in the process mining community; however, several privacy-preserving data transformationtechniques have been proposed in the data mining community. Many similarities between datamining and process mining exist, but there are key differences that make privacy-preserving datamining techniques unsuitable to anonymise process data (without adaptations). In this article, weanalyse data privacy and utility requirements for healthcare process data and assess the suitabilityof privacy-preserving data transformation methods to anonymise healthcare data. We demonstratehow some of these anonymisation methods affect various process mining results using three publiclyavailable healthcare event logs. We describe a framework for privacy-preserving process mining thatcan support healthcare process mining analyses. We also advocate the recording of privacy metadatato capture information about privacy-preserving transformations performed on an event log.

Patients' preferences when comparing analogue implant impressions using a polyether impression material versus digital impressions (Intraoral Scan) of dental implants.

OBJECTIVES: The primary objective of this clinical study was to assess the patients' perception of the difference between an analogue impression approach on the one hand and an intra-oral scan (IO scan) on the other when restoring implants in the non-aesthetic zone. A second objective was to analyse the difference in time needed to perform these two procedures. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Thirty consecutive patients who had received 41 implants (Straumann tissue level) in the non-aesthetic zone in an implant-based referral practice setting in the Netherlands. As they were to receive crown and or bridge work on the implants, in one session, the final impressions were taken with both an analogue technique and with an intraoral scan. Patients were also asked if, directly after the treatment was carried out, they would be prepared to fill out a questionnaire on their perception of both techniques. The time involved following these two procedures was also recorded. RESULTS: The preparatory activities of the treatment, the taste of the impression material and the overall preference of the patients were significantly in favour of the IO scan. The bite registration, the scan head and gag reflex positively tended to the IO scan, but none of these effects were significant. The overall time involved with the IO scan was more negatively perceived than the analogue impression. Overall less time was involved when following the analogue impression technique than with the IO scan. CONCLUSIONS: The overall preference of the patients in our sample is significantly in favour of the approach using the IO scan. This preference relates mainly to the differences between the compared approaches with respect to taste effects and their preparatory activities. The patients did perceive the duration of IO scan more negatively than the analogue impression approach.

Need for a new skin cancer management strategy.

The worldwide incidence of skin cancer (especially nonmelanoma skin cancer) has increased markedly during the last decades. Skin cancer should be considered a chronic disease. To manage the future costs and quality of care for patients with skin cancer, a revised health strategy is needed. These new strategies should be combined into a disease management system that organizes health care for one well-documented health care problem using a systematic approach. This article explores multiple opportunities for the development of a disease management system regarding skin cancer that will provide structured and multidisciplinary care.