“Jack of all trades, master of none”, the saying goes. It is a celebration of focus, of specialization, of the rule of the concrete over the general. In today’s complex, and sometimes overwhelming world, this is more relevant than ever. And yet, one cannot avoid thinking that a hyper-specialized world is a world without context, a world that shies away from connections, and risks missing the big picture that might be just the thing that gives meaning to what we do. This is why we don’t agree with the popular saying, and especially in today’s technology driven environment. Sometimes a “Jack of all trades” is precisely what you need.
This realization came to us reflecting back on our journey in the healthcare industry. Although it can be argued that focusing on an industry vertical is already a specialization, it has been interesting to discover just how flexible the solution is. Process mining can be applied to a wide variety of problems and use cases in healthcare providing a powerful analysis tool, and a different perspective from traditional KPIs. Its versatility in tracing sequences of events and delivering transparency to otherwise hidden day to day activities can be applied to many situations providing a much needed context that leads to richer insights and better decisions.
Let us explore briefly as an example some of the use cases we have developed in recent projects:
- Patient Journeys – In a recent project we studied the treatment process of cancer patients. Our solution was perfect for this use case since we were able to pull together data from different sources (primary care, specialists, tests, treatments, etc.) to reconstruct the journey of the patient from diagnostic to final outcome. This allowed us to analyze durations, use of resources, impact of certain activities, and to compare different clinical pathways (fast track vs standard, etc.).
- Protocol Adherence – As with any human activity there are bound to be mistakes, omissions, delays, and other issues when executing an established protocol. Process mining allows you to go beyond the adherence KPI and dig into the context, situations, and the different causes that result in non conformance. Whether it be administering medication or following blood loss protocol in a planned C-Section, understanding exactly in which situations and why a protocol is breached is fundamental to improving patient safety and mitigating risk.
- Improve waiting times and patient flows – A wealth of KPIs exist around occupancy, saturation of certain resources, and waiting times. Yet getting to the root causes of why these KPIs are not meeting targets can prove elusive. Understanding where the bottlenecks happen and why, or how certain sequences of activities impact durations and patient flows is key to implementing the necessary changes to turn KPIs from red to green.
- Reduce discards in pharmacy preparations – What are the root causes behind the discard of parenteral nutrition preparations? Analysing the preparation process can provide key insights into discard rates. Under what circumstances does contamination occur? When and why do preparation errors happen? Why do some preparations exceed their shelf life? These are all questions that can be answered leveraging the transparency that a process mining solution can provide.
- Reduce invoicing errors – Invoicing relies on having accurate data on the treatments, tests, medication, and other services provided to each patient. This data is generally distributed, and many times there are breakdowns in how it is gathered and passed on to the right application to generate the invoice. This causes billing errors leading to revenue loss or time consuming disputes, but it also means that many healthcare providers spend valuable time and resources in validating and correcting what is being invoiced. Process mining can pinpoint the underlying causes of the discrepancies providing a basis to implement improvements and optimize the process.
Many other use cases can be identified, from physical asset monitoring tracking to tracing the journey of biological samples, or even assessing the success of a VR Rehab program by analysing the sequences of actions performed by a patient (more on this in a future post).
These are just a few examples to highlight the versatility of our solution, and why in this case it is a “Jack of all trades and master of many”. If you have an idea of a use case that you think could benefit from the transparency and analytical capabilities provided by Inverbis, why not talk to us? We are convinced there are still many trades that our solution can still master.
Ask us for a demo.
Check some of our videos:
- New ➽ ICU discharges: where time slips away
- Fast Track vs Standard Path: Which is Better for Diagnosing Colorectal Cancer
- What causes discards in parenteral nutrition preparation? Key factors revealed!
- How Process Mining Uncovers Medication Administration Issues
The Prompter.io is our open project to share our experience—and that of others—in integrating language models and data-to-text techniques into process intelligence. Don’t miss it!
