Process Mining in Frail Elderly Care: A Literature Review

Process mining has proved to be a valuable technique for extracting process knowledge from data within information systems. Much work has been conducted in applying process mining to domains such as logistics, banking, transportation and many areas of the government, including healthcare. Frail elderly people who have an increased risk of adverse outcomes are amongst the main users of healthcare services and understanding healthcare processes for the frail elderly is challenging because of their diverse and complex needs combined with an often high number of co-morbidities. This paper aims to provide an overview of work applying process mining techniques to improving the care of frail elderly people. We conducted a literature search using broad criteria to identify 1,047 potential papers followed by a review of titles, abstract and content which identified eight papers where process mining techniques have been successfully applied to the care of frail elderly people. Our review shows that, to date, there has been limited application of process mining to support this important segment of the population. We summarise the results based on five themes that emerged: types of source data and process; geographical location; analysis methodology; medical domain; and challenges. Our paper concludes with a discussion on the issues and opportunities for process mining to improve the care pathways for frail elderly people.