# Question-Driven Methodology for Analyzing Emergency Room Processes Using Process Mining
## 3 Methods
### New Methodology
This may involve grouping activities into subprocesses or splitting activities into more specific ones, in order to obtain more details of the process. This can be done manually or automatically according to the information provided by the domain expert. Specific fields may be significant for a specific analysis, but not for another, so this task may not apply to all FPQ. Verify data quality:  
In addition to the explained challenges, further general issues have been identified from the literature review that must be tackled when generating an event log for process mining purposes in healthcare. Some of the most significant ones that should be studied and considered are:  
1. The definition of 11 patterns that describe the event log quality issues, such as incorrect inputs from UI forms, incorrect time stamps, incorrect format of the data, missing episode IDs related to the characteristics, missing events or activities, repeated events, and others. They should be considered when extracting, building a data reference model and generating an event log. More details can be found in [24]. 2. The identification of 27 quality issues regarding the quality of the event log, classified into 4 categories, including process characteristics (amount of data, different types of traces and event granularity) and the quality of the event log (missing, imprecise, incorrect and irrelevant data). The details of the 27 quality issues are described in [20; 25]. If the data contain incorrect or inaccurate values, they should be verified and checked with the HIS data owners to see if they are useful or not. If the data can be fixed by the experts to obtain the correct values, they still can be used. In case this is not reliable, the data should not be included in the analysis. It is important to overcome these challenges in the first stage, since it is in this stage that the data model is constructed. This model will facilitate data extraction and filtering processes for the subsequent stage of creating the event log. **Stage 2. **: Event log creation:  
The event log creation stage considers the FPQ, establishes a specific data model and builds an event log to use in the following stages. Table 2 sums up the main activities of this stage and provides a series of guidelines to be considered during this stage. **Activity 2.1. **: Identify data required to perform the specific analysis  
Identify the FPQ to be answered and identify what data from the general data model will be used. These data must be extracted to a specific data model for the question, where all of the required data are stored and from where the event log will be built. This specific data model may be built in a database for the specific question or just extracted in a temporary way to build the event log. It is expected that this specific data model may be used for several similar questions, but in the long term will be changing according to questions that are addressed. **Activity 2.2. **: Create the event log:  
Once the data stored in the specific data reference model are available, a specific event log must be created each time a question requires a response. Every event log is guided by the question that requires an answer. Event logs are the input for all process mining techniques and represent the actual execution of a process. An event log is composed of traces (i.e., process instances or episodes in this context), and each trace is represented by the ordered sequence of events that have occurred during the execution of that particular episode. Each event may contain additional information about its execution, such as its performer. **Activity 2.3. **: Include specific characteristics for each event or activity according to the specific analysis:  
According to the characteristics of the data and the question that requires an answer, certain data types must be included in the event log for later use in the discovery or improvement of the process model.