Performance and Work Practices Comparison of Emergency Departments through Process Mining

Emergency Departments (EDs) have gained particular attention under the pressure of the public opinion and national authorities. The EDs’ performance has in fact the highest impact on patient care and is highly relevant in public opinion, e.g. public debate on excessive waiting time or misdiagnosis. Therefore, through the past years, the need to improve the EDs’ operational efficiency has attracted much atten-tion from researchers and practitioners. Health managers and national health authorities have progressively posed more attention to ED performances and created some indicators to understand the service level offered to the patients, like waiting times and similar indicators. However, they tend to evaluate and monitor ED process-es by only synthetic indicators that do not provide a detailed picture of the ED sys-tems, due to the complexity of healthcare processes. Such an approach does not allow to deeply analyze process performances and to compare practices and results among different EDs. On the contrary, a more in-depth knowledge of ED perfor-mances and patient-flows may allow to identify the main process problems (e.g., bot-tlenecks, process anomalies, etc.), to streamline/optimize the flows, and to replicate the “best practices” from the best performing EDs. Insert in this context, this on-going research intends to investigate the operational performances and to compare the managerial practices of two distinct EDs exploiting process mining techniques. Process mining can support the identification of path-ways, the evaluation of process performances, and the exploration of potential best practices. A real case study involving two Italian EDs is presented.