Integrated Declarative Process and Decision Discovery of the Emergency Care Process

Deviations and variations are the norm rather than the exception in medical diagnosis and treatment processes. Physicians must leverage their knowledge and experience to choose an appropriate variation for each patient. However, this knowledge and experience is often tacit. Process modeling offers a way to convert tacit to explicit knowledge. Many process mining techniques have been developed due to the difficulty of doing this manually, yet, they often neglect the decisions themselves, and these proposed techniques are just one piece of a comprehensive process discovery method. In this paper, we use the Action Design Research methodology to develop a method for process and decision discovery of medical diagnosis and treatment processes. The method was iteratively improved and validated by applying it to a practical setting, which was the emergency medicine department of a hospital. An analysis of the resulting model shows that previously tacit knowledge was successfully made explicit.