What do healthcare professionals really want to know

Understanding the information needs of stakeholders is necessary for developing and implementing successful process mining techniques with the right requirements. Our recent systematic literature review on process mining in healthcare (De Roock & Martin, 2022) revealed that the information needs of healthcare professionals rarely received explicit consideration when carrying out process mining projects.
Therefore, we propose a reproducible method to systematically identify the information needs of healthcare professionals. The method contains four main phases: (1) initiation, (2) identification of information needs, (3) synthesis of information needs, and (4) assessing feasibility.
In the first phase, we identify the different stakeholders, familiarize ourselves with the specific context and manage administration. In the second phase, we prepare a topic guide and test the questions through pilot interviews. Next, the intermediate outcomes are presented to the stakeholders and when the questions are verified, the interviews or focus groups with the staff can start. After a few interviews, we propose to analyze the current findings. When saturation is not yet reached, the interviews or focus groups can resume. In the third phase the information needs of the different stakeholders are synthesized and prioritization is discussed with the stakeholders. Lastly, in the fourth phase we link back to process mining methods and data.
As part of the Design Science Research Methodology of Peffers et al. (2007), this method was demonstrated in a real-life healthcare setting at the University Hospital of Brussels (UZ Brussel), where the information needs of the staff of the emergency room with regard to process mining were identified by interviewing 18 staff members.