Process Mining of Disease Trajectories: A Feasibility Study

Modelling patient disease trajectories from evidence in electronic health records could help clinicians and medical researchers develop a better understanding of the progression of diseases within target populations. Process mining provides a set of well-established tools and techniques that have been used to mine electronic health record data to understand healthcare care pathways. In this paper we explore the feasibility for using a process mining methodology and toolset to automate the identification of disease trajectory models. We created synthetic electronic health record data based on a published disease trajectory model and developed a series of event log transformations to reproduce the disease trajectory model using standard process mining tools. Our approach will make it easier to produce disease trajectory models from routine health data.