A Process Mining Pipeline to Characterize COVID-19 Patients' Trajectories and Identify Relevant Temporal Phenotypes From EHR Data

Abstract

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic involved the disruption of the processes of care and the need for immediately effective re-organizational procedures. In the context of digital health, it is of paramount importance to determine how a specific patients' population reflects into the healthcare dynamics of the hospital, to investigate how patients' sub-group/strata respond to the different care processes, in order to generate novel hypotheses regarding the most effective healthcare strategies. We present an analysis pipeline based on the heterogeneous collected data aimed at identifying the most frequent healthcare processes patterns, jointly analyzing them with demographic and physiological disease trajectories, and stratify the observed cohort on the basis of the mined patterns. This is a process-oriented pipeline which integrates process mining algorithms, and trajectory mining by topological data analyses and pseudo time approaches. Data was collected for 1,179 COVID-19 positive patients, hospitalized at the Italian Hospital "Istituti Clinici Salvatore Maugeri" in Lombardy, integrating different sources including text admission letters, EHR and hospital infrastructure data. We identified five temporal phenotypes, from laboratory values trajectories, which are characterized by statistically significant different death risk estimates. The process mining algorithms allowed splitting the data in sub-cohorts as function of the pandemic waves and of the temporal trajectories showing statistically significant differences in terms of events characteristics.

Keywords: COVID-19; Electronic Health Record (EHR); digital health; electronic phenotyping algorithms; healthcare dynamics; precision medicine; process mining; temporal phenotypes.