Comparing Care Pathways Between COVID-19 Pandemic Waves Using Electronic Health Records: A Process Mining Case Study

The COVID-19 pandemic caused rapid shifts in the workflow of many health services, but evidence of how this affected multidisciplinary care settings is limited. In this data study, we propose a process mining approach that utilises timestamped data from electronic health records to compare care provider patterns across pandemic waves. To investigate healthcare patterns during the pandemic, we collected routine events from Scottish hospital episodes in adults with COVID-19 status, generating treatment logs based on care provider input. Conformance checking metrics were used to select the Inductive Miner infrequent (IMi) algorithm for downstream analysis. Visual diagrams from the discovered Petri Nets indicated interactions on provider- and activity-level data subsets. Measures of “cross-log conformance checking” and graph edit distance (GED) further quantified variation in care complexity in adverse subgroups. Our baseline cohort included 1153 patients with COVID-19 linked to 55,212 relevant care provider events. At the conformance checking stage, the IMi model achieved good log fitness ( \(\overline{LF }\) $\overline{\mathit{LF}}$ \(=0.95\) $=0.95$ ) and generalisation ( \(\overline{G }\) $\overline{G}$ \(=0.89\) $=0.89$ ), but limited precision ( \(\overline{PR }\) $\overline{\mathit{PR}}$ \(=0.27\) $=0.27$ ) across all granularity levels. More structured care procedures were present in Wave 1, compared to limited multidisciplinary involvement in Wave 2. Care activities differed in patients with extended stay ( \(GED=348, \overline{ PR }\) $GED=348,\overline{\mathit{PR}}$ \(=0.231\) $=0.231$ vs \(GED=197, \overline{PR }\) $GED=197,\overline{\mathit{PR}}$ \(=0.429\) $=0.429$ in shorter stays). We demonstrated that process mining can be incorporated to investigate differential complexity in patients with COVID-19 and derive fine-grained evidence on shifts in healthcare practice. Future process-driven studies could use clinical oversight to understand operational adherence and driving factors behind service changes during pressured periods.