Modelling and Mining of Patient Pathways: A Scoping Review

TL;DR

This paper reviews the emerging field of modeling and mining patient pathways using electronic health data, discussing representation models, mining techniques, and case studies to understand clinical trajectories.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of methods and challenges in representing and analyzing patient pathways from health data, highlighting recent research developments.

Findings

Identification of common representation models for patient pathways

Overview of data mining techniques applied to health trajectories

Examples of case studies demonstrating pathway analysis

Abstract

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.