Process mining as visualization technique

Process mining can produce a flowchart which is better to look at rather then 3millions rows of event data.

Animation adds to the flowchart yet another element: one can see the frequent paths taken or time delays between steps.

Preferred Concept Ancestor/Parent

In a recent process mining effort, I saw and interesting problem.

In order to simplify a log, it is important to transform events (e.g., Ultrasound of Abdomen) to a less granular events in order to make the process instances more similar to each other. But how to choose the correct ancestor concept for that – should it be Ultrasound study or Radiology Report (any one of them) or should be imaging of abdomen.

The two approaches I ended up with is a choosing a preferred hierarchy level for a given domain (e.g., anti-infectives level for drugs) or go by parent with a certain among of descendant concepts. (e.g., concepts with 500 descendant concepts are too broad parents) Solving it for any concept is not so trivial.

Does your IDR support well terminology abstractions of this kind?

Nitro – software for log transformation

ProM family of programs has a new tool.

Nitro

It can transfor CSV file into the new XES log format. Old standard was MXML. However, the new version of ProM  (version 6), still supports and internally uses MXML.

More complex process representation which better models real life

Not just processes but Proclets!

 

See this article

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.35.7318&rep=rep1&type=pdf

 

You can have two patient process instances affect each other.

 

Process mining book

Many IT systems end up producing logs of events. These logs can be analyzed.

There is a new book by a very well know workflow researcher: Wil M.P. van der Aalst.

Highlights (taken from Springer site)

1. First book on process mining, bridging the gap between business process modeling and business intelligence.
2. Written by one of the most influential and most-cited computer scientists and the best-known BPM researcher.
3. Self-contained and comprehensive overview for a broad audience in academia and industry.
4. The reader can put process mining into practice immediately due to the applicability of the techniques and the availability of the open-source process mining software ProM.

Here are the links to the book:

http://www.processmining.org/book/start

http://www.amazon.com/Process-Mining-Discovery-Conformance-Enhancement/dp/3642193447/

Workflow handbook series – the 2011 book

Workflow Management Coalition published every year one book in a workflow handbook series. It often contains interesting case studies and hints about the future. In 2011, the book does not contain any interesting insights relevant directly to healthcare since the 2011 book focuses on social networks and workflow.

 

See for yourself:

 

http://www.futstrat.com/books/handbook11-links.php

TOC: http://www.futstrat.com/books/downloads/Introduction2011_preview.pdf

Conference series focusing on workflow technology and healthcare

Every professional focusing on healthcare and workflow may be interested in a very interesting conference. It started in 2007 and is titled ProHealth.

 

Read about past conferences and the current one (2011) here:

http://www.uni-ulm.de/in/prohealth-11/previous-workshops.html

Our 2011 journal article

We are pleased to announce publication of a comprehensive journal article published by our group which describes in detail our workflow engine implementation and infrastructure.

Direct link to free full text of the article:

 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/11/43

PubMed link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21477364

PubMedCentral link:

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3079703 

 

 

Support for XPDL 2.0 in JaWE (Together workflow editor)

The new version 4 supports version 2 of the WMFC’s process definition standard !  This was promised by the developers and the new version delivers on this promise.

See all files here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jawe/files/jawe/

Quick access to release notes is via the forum post.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jawe/forums/forum/1147179/topic/4344744

HealthFlow data export tool

To provide more detail on the ability to work with RetroGuide or FlowGuide related data in tools like Weka or R, we provide some screenshots here.

 

HF extract tool (former (less suitable) name RetroGuide Admin)

 

MXML is format for ProM process mining tool. (workflow log schema)
Data buton creates CSV file.

There is also option to extract into ARFF.

Analysis in Weka: