Improving Pakistan's Healthcare System through Process Mininng

According to the latest WHO statistics, Pakistan is anticipating several healthcare challenges in the next two decades. Some of the major challenges include the lack of education, inaccessible health facilities, and unsustainable healthcare budgeting policies. The government of Paki

Project Title

Improving Pakistan's Healthcare System through Process Mininng

Project Area of Specialization

Computer Science

Project Summary

According to the latest WHO statistics, Pakistan is anticipating several healthcare challenges in the next two decades. Some of the major challenges include the lack of education, inaccessible health facilities, and unsustainable healthcare budgeting policies. The government of Pakistan spent only 2.75% of its total GDP on health care in 2016, which was slightly better than Bangladesh (2.37%), but lower than India (3.66%) and Sri Lanka (3.89%). These challenges call for a strong need to build capabilities for the improvement of Pakistan’s health care processes to be more systematic in planning and investing resources in an efficient manner. Our objective is to clearly understand and improve current healthcare processes in Pakistan by using Process Mining tools and techniques. Process mining, a special type of data science/mining, aims to discover, monitor and improve real (i.e., not assumed) processes by extracting knowledge from available ‘event logs’ of information systems. It is an emerging area that synergically combines model-based and data-oriented analysis techniques to obtain useful insights on how business processes are executed within an organization. Process mining enables healthcare organizations to evaluate clinical pathways, confirm that clinical and medical protocols are followed, visualize resource utilization, identify bottlenecks, capture insights and improvement opportunities. The expected impact of this project is that HealthCare sector (with a further expansion to other sectors) generates value from past, current and future data, supporting innovative models, and delivery of equitable health outcomes for all our people of Pakistan.

Project Objectives

We have observed two major type of problems associated with the health care sector in Pakistan: visible and invisible problems. The visible problem are those that are known to the health care professionals, higher authorities, and to the general public. For instance, 60 million people in Pakistan are living below the poverty line and are not able to fulfill their basic needs due to limited resources/finance. In this scenario, the problems of health care in the country are linked directly to the prevailing social, economic, and political systems that determine the allocation of resources within the healthcare sector. Also, the condition of government hospitals and health care centres is far below than average making most of the medical facilities almost inaccessible to general public, causing delay in timely diagnosis leading to late treatment. Other visible problems are associated with increase in population, air and land pollution, lack of health infrastructure, poor management, lack of medical research, increase in long-term conditions (such as heart diseases, diabetes, disability, and musculo-skeletal conditions), lack of awareness in general public, lack of medical professionals especially in rural areas, new infections and antibiotic resistance, and above all the growing health consequences due to climate change.

On the other hand, there is another set of underlying problems within the healthcare system in Pakistan that is mostly invisible and therefore, mostly ignored. These invisible problems are mainly associated with the lack of standard processes of health care services throughout the country. In other words, we may say that there is no way to record and manage patient journey process. A patient journey is the complete treatment process that begins from the first visit to a General Practitioner to seek consultation and ends when the patient has had the necessary treatment performed and the case is considered closed. As many patients are treated in specialized units, it can be considered a best practice to prepare a separate process model for each care unit.

Through this proposal, we are presenting a practically possible way to solve most of the visible problems by solving the invisible problems within the healthcare sector of Pakistan through process mining tools and techniques.

Project Implementation Method

Our idea is to record and follow the digital footprints throughout the patient’s journey process with the help of process mining that is an emerging field combining data mining with business process management aiming to make unexpressed knowledge explicit and to facilitate better understanding and linking of healthcare processes. In other words, it is a method for distilling a structured process description from a set of real executions. In this definition, ‘a set of real executions’ means a process log with data about the order in which the activities were executed. It is like a history of what happened in the process. This set of executions is also referred to as an ‘event log’, ‘history’ or ‘audit trail’. An event log contains information about events which refer to ‘activities’ or ‘tasks’ executed in a particular process and for a specific ‘case’. The case is the object being handled. Typically, event logs also record the time when these tasks were executed or when they were in a particular state. This is known as the timestamp of an event. Event logs also store information about the originator of a task, i.e., who performed which task or initiated an event.

Benefits of the Project

There are clear evidences that data science and analytics, is an emerging topic of research in improving the health care industry. We are taking healthcare sector in Pakistan as one of the use-cases of this wider industry. Our focus is to clearly understand (discovery), analyse (conformance), and improve (enhancements) current healthcare processes in Pakistan towards sustainability, by building Process Mining capabilities, i.e., expertise, datasets, best-practices, software tools/infrastructure, human and intellectual capital, to deliver sustainable services and investing resources in a most efficient way. The aim is to provide the best outcomes possible for people’s health and wider wellbeing.

In Pakistan, no published work has been found related to process mining in general or the applications of process mining in healthcare, in specific. There is no Pakistan-based university, research centre, software vendor, or even commercial company researching or offering consulting services in Process Mining. To be able to explore such an opportunity, Pakistan needs to enhance the quantity and quality of its workforce in Data Science, in general, and in Process Mining, in particular. The proposed project would open up a new era of research in Pakistan, starting from healthcare, leading to other sectors including agriculture, retail stores, and education.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

We are going to deliver a Healthcare Process mining system with a friendly Web-App. The web app provides the user with a center point where they can view and store the patients’ record.

The details of the proposed Pcs are:

Core i5 PCs are used to run the Web App and maintains patients’ record.  

Internet is used access the web app.

Hosting is needed to host the web app.

Disco Software is used for applying data mining to extract real processes, time taken by each activity, and identify any bottlenecks, inconsistences etc.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Software System

Core Industry

IT

Other Industries

IT , Medical

Core Technology

Big Data

Other Technologies

Artificial Intelligence(AI)

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com