Process mining is an exciting application area for healthcare processes. At the same time, healthcare processes often present some challenges, for example, in terms of data quality and complexity.

For the upcoming Process Mining Café this Wednesday, we have invited Owen Johnson from the University of Leeds. At a UK hospital, they employed medical students to construct an event log of Functional Neurological Syndrome (FNS) patients by following the paper trail of each patient. The discovered process map illustrated quite how often these patients were misdiagnosed and sent around.

They also developed a process mining methodology specifically for healthcare processes. We’ll discuss how this methodology differs from the classical PM2 and our 12-step process mining methodology. The session will be essential for anyone applying process mining in healthcare, but also inspiring and informative for people outside of the healthcare domain. Join us all!

The café takes place this Wednesday, 17 September, at 15:00 CEST (Check your timezone here). As always, you don’t need to register. Point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time.

Sign up for the café mailing list here to receive a reminder one hour before the session starts. Or add the time to your calendar if you don’t want to miss it.

We are happy to announce the release of Disco 4.2.

Forged in the heatwaves of summer, this release is built to melt away any annoyances, and to rid us of all those nasty bugs that have been itching us out on the patio. With some topped-up security and even tighter performance and stability across the board, it’s got all the fixins and then some.

Thanks for lending a hand with all your feedback and your bug reports. Keep us posted and, as always, thank you for using Disco!

How to update

We recommend that you update to the latest version of Disco at your earliest convenience. Disco will automatically download and install this update the next time you run it, if you are connected to the internet¹.

If you prefer to install this update of Disco manually, you can download and run the latest installer packages from fluxicon.com/disco/download

Changes

• Process Map:
  • Improved performance and stability of graph layout.
  • Improved reliability of metrics generation.
• Excel Import:
  • Improved reliability and performance.
  • Security updates.
• Airlift: Improved reliability.
• Control Center: Improved hardware detection.
• Software Update:
  • Fixed a bug that could prevent manual updates in some situations.
  • Improved robustness of automatic updates.
• UI: Fixed a bug where some charts in the analysis view could not be navigated via keyboard input.
• Connectivity:
  • Improved resilience in degraded network conditions.
  • Security updates.
• Platform: Java update.

You can use anonymization to put people at ease. Process mining is not about monitoring employees but about improving the process. But when people are new to process mining, seeing their names in the data can make them uncomfortable and less likely to support you in your process mining project. Removing their names and replacing them with a generic placeholder can help you build trust.

It’s very easy to do. Watch this 4-minute video to learn how to anonymize the resource names in Disco.

In the last Process Mining Café before the summer break, we had invited Daniel Kaße from VKPB in Germany to tell us more about how he addressed the concerns from data protection, the works council, and the operational manager.

We talked about why building trust in your process mining project is necessary in the first place and how you do it. We also discussed technical steps you can take, such as removing unnecessary information, anonymization, and pseudonymization.

In the end, Daniel gave us the following checklist:

Watch the recording of the café here if you have missed it. A big thanks to Daniel and to all of you for joining us!

Quick warning: There are a few cuts in the video due to some technical issues we had on the day of recording. Our apologies for that. But you’ll be able to follow our discussion without any problem.

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• Sign up for the camp mailing list to be notified when Daniel’s camp presentation becomes available.

• One of the advantages of Disco is that it analyzes all your data entirely locally. For further details see our privacy policy here.

• When talking about formalizing the agreement, we mentioned the Ethical Charter that Léonard Studer from the City of Lausanne used to put his colleagues at ease. We also talked about this in the Process Mining Café with Léonard.

• Daniel went a step further and created a formal contract about the operational use of log data. He was so kind to share this document with the community, so that you can take it as a starting point for your own organization. → Download the original German ‘Vereinbarung zur betrieblichen Nutzung von Protokolldaten’ or the translated English version here.

• Daniel removed the data that he did not need, such as customer names. He did this in the data preparation phase using the ETL tool KNIME → See a screenshot of his KNIME function here.

• Daniel also pseudonomized some of the information that he wanted to keep. By replacing the original value of a sensitive data field like the employee name with a pseudonomized value, you remove the direct traceability but preserve organizational patterns. For example, you can still see if just one person handles a case, or if it is handed back and forth between multiple people (without knowing who these people are). Daniel used a hash function for his pseudonymization → See a screenshot of his hash function in KNIME here.

• If you don’t need to store a mapping between original and pseudonomized values, you can use the built-in anonymization function of Disco. During the export, you choose what to anonymize (case IDs, resource names, attributes, timestamps) and then share or re-import the data set to work with the anonymized data. As we discussed during the café, anonymization or pseudonymization can be a method of building trust, but you also lose a certain level of analyzability. We give you a detailed overview of which analysis possibilities you lose with the different types of anonymization here.

• Don’t rely too much on technical fixes, and be aware that even anonymized data might be traced back in other ways. We also discuss this in the ‘How to be a responsible process miner’ Process Mining Café with Dirk Fahland and Felix Mannhardt here.

Contact us anytime at cafe@fluxicon.com if you have questions or suggestions about the café.

Have you seen that the Process Mining Café is also available as a podcast? So, if you prefer to listen to our episodes in your favorite podcast player, you can get them all here.

Sign up for our café mailing list and the YouTube playlist, follow Fluxicon on LinkedIn, or add the café calendar to never miss a Process Mining Café in the future.

One of the presenters at this year’s Process Mining Camp, Daniel Kaße from VKPB in Germany, talked about how he addressed the concerns of various people in his organization. 

These concerns are very real. Data protection teams, the works council, and process owners need to trust that you will act responsibly in your process mining project.  

Because this is such an important topic, we invited Daniel to the upcoming Process Mining Café tomorrow. We’ll discuss how to build trust in your organization and explore anonymization methods you can use to obfuscate the data. Join us!

The café takes place this Wednesday, 18 June, at 15:00 CEST (Check your timezone here). As always, you don’t need to register. Point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time.

Sign up for the café mailing list here to receive a reminder one hour before the session starts. Or add the time to your calendar if you don’t want to miss it.