Research Paper: Process Mining and Synthetic Health Data: Reflections and Lessons Learnt

Analysing the treatment pathways in real-world health data can provide valuable insight for clinicians and decision-makers. However, the procedures for acquiring real-world data for research can be restrictive, time-consuming and risks disclosing identifiable information. Synthetic data might enable representative analysis without direct access to sensitive data. In the first part of our paper, we propose an approach for grading synthetic data for process analysis based on its fidelity to relationships found in real-world data. In the second part, we apply our grading approach by assessing cancer patient pathways in a synthetic healthcare dataset (The Simulacrum provided by the English National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service) using process mining. Visualisations of the patient pathways within the synthetic data appear plausible, showing relationships between events confirmed in the underlying non-synthetic data. Data quality issues are also present within the synthetic data which reflect real-world problems and artefacts from the synthetic dataset’s creation. Process mining of synthetic data in healthcare is an emerging field with novel challenges. We conclude that researchers should be aware of the risks when extrapolating results produced from research on synthetic data to real-world scenarios and assess findings with analysts who are able to view the underlying data.