Process Mining and Customer Journey Mapping in Stroke Rehabilitation: Digitally Enhancing Patient-Centred Care

Background and Framework: Focus on patient-centred care and enhancing experience is priority across Australia. Stroke, the second most common cause of death in many countries, has multiple consumer touchpoints that would benefit from better understanding patient journeys, subsequently impacting better patient centred care, process improvements, and patient outcomes in stroke rehabilitation. Manual processes involved in Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is tedious and subjective. Digital tools through process mining extracts process data from event logs in existing information systems.

Methodology: This study utilized process mining and variant analysis for 130 stroke rehabilitation patients to digitally develop customer journey maps from referral to discharge. 168 cases from the AROC data set were matched with 6291 cases from Stroke Index Data. Study explored variants for age, gender, outcome measures, Length of stay (LOS) and Functional Independence Measure (FIM) Change.

Results: The study illustrated the process journey map and process variants, with results highlighting key attributes, touchpoints and timestamps along the patient journey and associated demographic and outcome relationships. Patients demonstrated a mean and median duration of 49.5 days and 44 days respectively. Nine variants were discovered, with majority of patients falling into Variant 1 (n=102; 78.46%). With variant analysis, relationships and attributes involving age, gender, LOS, FIM change, and patient’s journeys were evident, with 4 cases experiencing stroke rehabilitation journeys of more than 100 days, warranting further investigation.

Conclusion: Digital health process mining utilization to analyse, visualise and enhance patient journeys contributes significantly to improving patient experience and patient-centred care.