Business Intelligence and Process Mining

Project description:

You are working as a Business Intelligence consultant for NHS. NHS has come to you for your advice
on how to boost their efficiency and effectiveness on the utilisation of ambulance, hospital beds and
the staff needed for patient care, esp. during the peak time e.g. winter periods, while maximising the
quality of patience care.

In particular, they would like to be more efficient and effective in utilising their hospital beds and
staff, helped by obtaining real-time information of their availabilities. They would like to make this
information available to management and administration staff. This would enable them to make
plans and make informed speedy decisions for dispatching patients and ambulances to suitable
hospital where there are adequate beds and staffs available.

Your task is to propose a Business Intelligence tool that will utilise real-time Process Mining
techniques to address this above problem. (Data mining techniques may also be used to support
process mining tasks, where suitable.)

The NHS is asking for the following real-time information and recommendations from your system:

• Availability of hospital beds and their types, inc. where they are (the location of the hospital)
and when they may/will become available. Hospital beds can be classified in terms of
departments/wards, they are
o Emergency department
o Cardiology
o Intensive care unit
▪ Paediatric intensive care unit
▪ Neonatal intensive care unit
▪ Cardiovascular intensive care unit
o Neurology
o Oncology
o Obstetrics and gynaecology, colloquially, maternity ward
• Availability of staff that can facilitate the above corresponding hospital beds;
• Number of patients waiting for the above hospital beds;
• Number of staff scheduled to be off duty or become available (staff roster);
• Availability and the real-time location of ambulances (assuming each ambulance is assigned
with a qualified driver and appropriate paramedic);
• Real-time recommendations of dispatches of ambulances and patients to appropriate
hospital beds; As a side-effect, you may also recommend staff roster, where appropriate;
• Create a control-flow model that describes the movement of ambulances and identify
potential bottle necks, e.g. where it is wasting time.
Project Tasks: create a consultancy report

Part 1: Domain/Problem Analysis (1.5 page)

Provide a high-level description of problems that NHS is facing above. You are welcome to use
references provided in [4] as well as using your own references.

Part 2: Detailed Design of Data and/or Event Log(2 page)

Based on the above specification, propose possible designs of Data and/or Event Logs that would
store all of the necessary information to support real-time dispatching of ambulances. This may
include patient’s time-based (medical care) activities when visiting NHS; locations and availabilities
of hospital beds and ambulances, etc. Explain these logs where it is not clear. You would need to
create at least 3 different event logs. Populate each of your data and/or Event Logs with 5 example
entries. Explain and justify your design.

Part 3: Determine what types of Process Mining or Business Intelligence techniques that you
would deploy to enable the above support and recommendations. Explain what these techniques
are and what they will do to solve the above problems. Explain why you have chosen these
techniques. (2 pages)

Part 4: Discuss the strengths and Challenges/Limitations of your proposed system (0.5 page)

Part 5: Citations and Document Style(no page limite)

Provide your document in an intuitive structure. Provide relevant references and use correct citation
styles.

Q&A:

Question 1 - For designing data logs, which diagram should be used, UML or ontology?

Answer – Do not use UML diagrams or ontologies. These data logs are the actual data/information
(instances) that you would use for process mining purposes. Therefore, if you do not have any event
log, you would need to explain how your data logs may be used for process mining. This in effect,
requires you to turn data log information into usable event logs, so that they are useful for process
mining purposes.

Question 2 – how many data logs are needed?

Answer – you can have 3 or more data logs, but you should be able to turn them into at least 3 event
logs. That is to say that your data logs should record all useful information that is needed for event
logs.
Question 3 – can I use UML class diagrams for event logs?

Answer - Data and Event logs store the actual data and not a class diagram or schema. If you have
only provided an UML (class) diagram that has no data in it, how would you mine event data from it?
You should provide example data sets for the process miner to mine.

Question 4 – am I required to use a Process Mining tool to process the data?

Answer – no, but your understanding of the tool will strengthen the background knowledge of your
project.