The assessment of data quality issues for process mining in healthcare using Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III, a freely available e-health record database

There is a growing body of literature on process mining in healthcare. Process mining of electronic health record systems could give benefit into better understanding of the actual processes happened in the patient treatment, from the event log of the hospital information system. Researchers report issues of data access approval, anonymisation constraints, and data quality. One solution to progress methodology development is to use a high-quality, freely available research dataset such as Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III, a critical care database which contains the records of 46,520 intensive care unit patients over 12 years. Our article aims to (1) explore data quality issues for healthcare process mining using Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III, (2) provide a structured assessment of Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III data quality and challenge for process mining, and (3) provide a worked example of cancer treatment as a case study of process mining using Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III to illustrate an approach and solution to data quality challenges. The electronic health record software was upgraded partway through the period over which data was collected and we use this event to explore the link between electronic health record system design and resulting process models.