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12.3 Applications 315

Fig. 12.12 Another Spaghetti process. The model is based on a group of 627 gynecological on-
cology patients. The event log contains 24,331 events referring to 376 different activities

Some think that care processes in hospitals can be improved by simple principles
from operations management or by introducing workflow technology. Process mod-
els such as the one shown in Fig. 12.1 demonstrate that this is not case. One needs
to better understand the variability, before suggesting solutions.
We conducted several process mining experiments based on event data of the
AMC hospital in Amsterdam [64]. Together with people of the AMC, we have been
investigating the introduction of workflow technology in this large academic hospi-
tal. This revealed many limitations of existing WFM/BPM systems when it comes
to care processes. The variability in these processes is larger than in most other do-
mains. This imposes unique requirements with respect to flexibility. Moreover, care
processes combine flow oriented tasks with scheduled tasks [65]. As a result, con-