Analyses of Public Health Databases via Clinical Pathway Modelling: TBWEB

One of the purposes of public health databases is to serve as repositories for storing information regarding the treatment of patients. TBWEB (TuBerculose WEB) is an epidemiological surveillance system for tuberculosis cases in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. This paper proposes an analysis of the TBWEB database with the use of clinical pathways modelling. Firstly, the database was analysed in order to find the interventions registered on the database. The clinical pathways were obtained from the database by the use of process mining techniques. Similar pathways were grouped into clusters in order to find the most common treatment sequences. Each cluster was characterised and the risk of bad outcomes associated with each cluster was discovered. Some clusters had an association with the risk of negative outcomes. This method can be applied to other databases, serve as a base for decision-making systems and can be used to monitor public health databases.