Process Analytics in Healthcare

As a professional in a care organisation, some of the following questions might sound familiar:

• How is a care process being performed in real-life?
• How to improve care pathways?
• How to improve the work organisation of nurses?
• How to make capacity estimations and facility design decisions?
• …

Recognise one or more of these questions? The research in the research line ‘Process Analytics in Healthcare’ focuses on such questions. Our team is determined to develop novel methods to answer these questions in a data-driven way.

Care organisations have the ambition to provide high-quality care to their patients. At the same time, they are confronted with significant challenges such as tightening budgets and increased care needs due to the ageing population. To face these challenges, care organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the need to manage their processes with the ambition to improve them.

In order to manage processes, such as the patient flow, care organisations need to gain profound insights into these processes to, for instance, identify bottlenecks. These insights can be retrieved from data as increasing volumes of data are being recorded about the execution of healthcare processes. Traditionally, this data originated from the information system of the care organisation. However, in the Internet of Things era, a variety of additional information sources such as real-time location systems and mobile apps are available. This enables the retrieval of richer information to support care organisations in decision-making.

The research line ‘Process Analytics in Healthcare’ focuses on conducting problem-focused, innovative research in close collaboration with academic and care partners, with the ambition to develop methods which enable care organisations to understand and improve their processes in a data-driven way. Over the years, we have established collaborations with a multitude of care organisations in Belgium and abroad. This ensures that we remain up to date with the sector’s specific challenges and, at the same time, ensures that research with societal impact is conducted.

Questions about this research line or seeing the potential to collaborate? Please feel free to contact prof. dr. Niels Martin, the principal investigator of this research line.