Using the DTW Method for Estimation of Deviation of Care Processes from a Care Plan

Hospitals increasingly use process models for structuring their care processes. Activities performed to patients are logged to a database or a log. These data can be used for managing and improving the efficiency of care processes and quality of care. In this article, we propose the method for estimation of deviation of care processes from a care plan. Care plan defines the steps of a patient treatment for a certain disease in a specific hospital. Care plan is built on the base of care process model. A care process model is built on the base of exemplars of care processes, stored in a database or a log. The Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm was used for estimation of deviation. The DTW algorithm measures a distance-like quantity between two given traces containing information about execution or not execution of actions defined by care plan.