Keep calm and follow the process - a different analytics perspective for healthcare
inverbis analytics
The value stream mining company: We help you improve your operational performance with the most flexible Process Mining
“Over 22% of cases that actually followed the fast track took longer to receive the diagnostic test than what the protocol dictated, reducing the effectiveness of what the protocol was created for in the first place”
A common objection that we come up against when we are explaining to prospective clients the benefits of our solution is: “yes, this is all good, but we already have that information”. This happens across all industries and I firmly believe it is a consequence of not fully understanding the difference between a traditional KPI and a process related KPI. The former gives you information about WHAT has happened whilst the latter opens a window into WHY it happened.
In healthcare, this argument is also present. “Our industry is different” (if I had a penny for every time I have been told this…). There seems to be an old and deeply rooted conviction that medical practice is a sort of art: disease manifests itself in many different and complex forms, and every patient is a world of its own.
And yet, if you can get past the initial reticences, medical practitioners turn out to be some of the more enthusiastic supporters of the technology. They know their statistics, and they understand process since they are immersed in protocols in their day to day. We recently worked on a project with a doctor to analyze two different pathways for the treatment of a certain cancer. There was the standard treatment, and a new pathway (lets call it the fast track) they had introduced to reduce the time delay in diagnosing the disease.
Now they had a significant amount of data, and KPIs around both pathways, like for example mortality rates, etc., but these KPIs did not tell the whole story. The inspiration of our doctor was to realise that the treatment was a process and could therefore be analysed with our solution from a different perspective.
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The first and quite obvious question was if the fast track pathway was actually being followed the way it was designed. Not surprisingly, we found that a number of cases that were labelled as fast track had actually followed the standard path. We also found that “over 22% of cases that actually followed the fast track took longer to receive the diagnostic test than what the protocol dictated, reducing the effectiveness of what the protocol was created for in the first place”.
We also looked at other aspects of the process and produced some findings that were not being captured by the standard analytics they were performing, which were basically centered on static outcomes. We found for example that patients that followed the standard track had on average 4 times more consultations with the internal medicine specialist than patients that took the fast track. This suggests that there is a potential for reducing resources spent on treatment by following the fast track. Other insights included a longer delay between diagnostic and first chemotherapy sessions for patients that followed the fast track (19% increase in time), although with a 44% reduction in the number of sessions needed. This, which might seem counterintuitive, could suggest that early diagnosis through the fast track pathway results in a better prognosis and therefore shorter treatment.
The findings are preliminary and the data obtained through the process mining solution is still being analysed by our good doctor, but the exercise shows the potential of the discipline in the analysis of clinical pathways with a new process (or if you prefer protocol or journey) perspective, opening a fresh new window into a different kind of analytics. This application of process mining is new and exciting, and the key is having an open mind to explore new ways of incorporating a process view to your standard KPIs. So Keep Calm and follow the process…
Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety・Public Health | Business Management (Analytics), Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality® (CPHQ)
1moYour solutions are great, inverbis analytics. Today, during a chat with someone in charge of the data team, we discussed process mining (once again). He mentioned that this is something to be built in the future, and I was like: "But there are people already running solutions. Why wait?" Just be patient, guys! I’m pretty sure many great things are coming for the company!