Mining Clinical Pathway Using Clustering and Rule Induction

This paper proposes maintenance and construction of clinical pathway by using data on histories of nursing orders. The methods consist of three process. First, data on counting sum of executed orders are extracted from hospital informaton system. Then, clustering is applied to the data and the labels for grouping are obtained. By using the labels, rule induction is applied, and classification power of each attribute is estimated. The attributes are sorted by an index of classification power, the original table is decomposed into sub tables. Clustering, rule induction and table decomposition methods are applied to the sub tables in a recursive way. The method was applied to a dataset whose patients had an operation of cataract a. The results show that the reuse of stored data will give a powerful tool for maintenance of clinical pathway, which can be viewed as data-oriented management of nursing schedule.