Modelling and Mining of Patient Pathways: A Scoping Review
This is a scoping review that maps existing literature for researchers in healthcare informatics, identifying gaps and trends in methods for analyzing patient pathways.
The paper surveys the emerging field of patient pathway research, which tackles the challenge of synthesizing and mining sequences of patient visits and procedures from electronic health data to reveal clinical and service insights, without presenting new experimental results.
The sequence of visits and procedures performed by the patient in the health system, also known as the patient's pathway or trajectory, can reveal important information about the clinical treatment adopted and the health service provided. The rise of electronic health data availability made it possible to assess the pathways of a large number of patients. Nevertheless, some challenges also arose concerning how to synthesize these pathways and how to mine them from the data, fostering a new field of research. The objective of this review is to survey this new field of research, highlighting representation models, mining techniques, methods of analysis, and examples of case studies.