Care Records and Healthcare Processes: Adding Context to Clinical Codes
Chammas L., Dwyer OP., Sallinger E., Davies J., Morris EJA.
Process mining techniques are being used to explore healthcare processes based upon information recorded about individual patients. In most cases, this information consists of clinical codes and dates: codes used to classify care events; dates indicating when these events occurred. These codes will not, in general, form part of the contemporaneous care record used by clinicians. At the same time, that record contains other, more detailed information about the care delivered. This paper explains how the provenance of coded information can affect its interpretation and how information from a care record can be used to stratify patient populations and provide context for process mining. The proposed methodology is illustrated through application to real-world data in an area of particular concern: the treatment and care of patients with colon cancer.