| dc.description.abstract | The Health Care sector is under considerable pressure concerning its financial aspects. Restricted budgets are available for the performance of care, meanwhile the costs of care are rising. Therefore, research in how and where costs in hospitals could be reduced, is required. This would also stimulate the increase of value in care.
Several studies have been performed on how care could be increased. Most of the studies only focused on the financial aspects and quality management facets. These studies were lacking a stepwise, efficient approach to study care processes to increase value.
This thesis is an analysis of the care processes, with the following research question: “How can Process Mining strengthen Value-Based Health Care?” The costs in this thesis refer to performance times of care activities.
A well-known concept in health care provides this research with a base and structure to investigate care processes: Value-Based Health Care (VBHC). VBHC is about maximizing the value of care for patients and to reduce care costs. To put VBHC in practice, the method ‘Time-Driven Activity-Base Costing’ (TD-ABC) was used, to support increasing care value by creating process models of care processes. The TD-ABC method provides seven steps, where one of the steps describes the manual creation of process models. Due to budget issues of hospitals, this part of the method had to be performed more efficiently. Therefore, Process Mining was introduced, focused on extracting knowledge from information systems to analyze performed processes.
In literature, the method ’Process Mining Process’ was mentioned, describing the performance of Process Mining in practice, which involves six steps.
The TD-ABC and Process Mining Process steps were combined to create a more effective and efficient method for analyzing care processes: The Care Mining Method. This method consists of five steps: 1) Select a medical condition, 2) Define Care Delivery Value Chain, 3) Develop Process maps ‘, 4) Perform analyzes, 5) Discussion and Validation.
With literature, the performance of the Care Mining method could not be tested. Therefore, this method was put into practice with two hospital cases. Unfortunately, more cases could not be acquired due to a lack in awareness of the importance of analyzing care processes, research time restrictions or budget limitations. Nevertheless, the results of these cases show that Process Mining could strengthen VBHC due to a decrease of the performance time of analyzing care processes (1), more visual and distinct process models (2) and more accurate and effective maintenance of the process models.
Further research could focus on investigating the resources of medical specialists, together with the throughput times of patients-related data. Financial aspects can thereafter be linked to the processes and total financial costs of throughput times can be determined. | |
