Mining time dependency patterns in clinical pathways

Clinical pathways are widely adopted by many large hospitals around the wor ld in order to provide high-quality patient treatment and reduce the length of hospital stay of each patient. The development of clinical pathways is a lengthy process, and may require the collaboration among physicians, nurs es, and staffs in a hospital. However, the individual differences cause gre at variances in the execution of clinical pathways. It calls for a more dyn amic and adaptive process to improve the performance of clinical pathways. This paper reports a data mining technique we have developed to discover th e time dependency pattern of clinical pathways for managing brain stroke. T he mining of time dependency pattern is to discover patterns of process exe cution sequences and to identify the dependent relation between activities in a majority of cases. By obtaining the time dependency patterns, we can p redict the paths for new patients when he/she is admitted into a hospital; in turn, the health care procedure will be more effective and efficient. (C ) 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.