Socio-Economic Planning Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx Please cite this article as: Alessandro Stefanini, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2019.100744 Available online 1 October 2019 0038-0121/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. A data-driven methodology for supporting resource planning of health services Alessandro Stefanini a, * , Davide Aloini a , Elisabetta Benevento b , Riccardo Dulmin a , Valeria Mininno a a Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction Engineering, University of Pisa, Largo Lucio Lazzarino 1, 56122, Pisa, Italy b Department of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via Orazio Raimondo, 00173, Rome, Italy A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Service Healthcare Resource planning Process mining Time-driven activity based costing ABSTRACT In recent years, healthcare systems have been forced to better organize their services in the fnal attempt to maximize both care effectiveness and effciency. In particular, emergent trends are prompting hospitals to pay more attention to the effective and effcient planning of resources and to the creation of patient-centred services, in which current activities and resources are reorganized around patients. This paper proposes a process mining based methodology to systematically support the resource planning of health services. Specifcally, combining Time-Driven Activity Based Costing and process mining approaches, it automatically identifes the patient fow and analytically evaluates activities, service times, and resource con- sumptions for a specifc class (-es) of patients (e.g., a DRG, patients with specifc medical condition, etc.). Thus, it allows to reliably estimate the expected resource consumptions for the patient group under investigation. Thanks to process mining, the method overcomes the limitations of existing quantitative approaches that are often time- consuming, based on subjective observations, and too case specifc. The method was applied to a real case study of lung cancer patients in an Italian hospital. 1. Introduction In the last 25 years, hospitals have taken sundry strategic improve- ment initiatives in the organization of care activities in order to ensure an effective delivery of health services at the minimum cost [1]. The benefts of a multidisciplinary approach in patient care, for example in treating cancer but also in many chronicle diseases, have been widely recognized in the healthcare literature [2] and boosted the dissemination of Patient-Focused Care (PFC) principle [3]. In this di- rection, one of the most relevant initiatives is the creation of hospital service lines, in which care is organized around an identifable service (e.g. cardiac care), a segment of market (e.g., child patients), or some combination of these two [4]. Positive expectations deriving from a centralized approach to specialist services are mostly linked to the potential of reducing varia- tions in care. Thus, innovative “patient-centric” organizational models (e.g. specialized care units and patient care pathways) were proposed and implemented in numerous healthcare organizations in the attempt to offer patients the best chance of 1) receiving high quality medical procedures, 2) being served by a team of specialists, which is able to tailor treatment, and 3) guaranteeing access to specialist counselling, supportive care, and rehabilitation [4,5]. Evidence of such a trend can be found in the cases of specialist Breast Centres [6], the Prostate Cancer Unit [5] and other specialized units [7] that are currently largely diffused in all Europe. However, devising and planning service lines entails substantial reconfguration of hospital operations and has a huge impact on the care process, particularly when the resources to serve these patients are physically co-located [4]. Most critical decisions belong to resource planning, organizing the workfow of activities and the coordination of internal/external processes and the related resources [4,8]. Due to the stochastic nature of healthcare systems and the complex dynamics and interactions of their inputs, activities and outputs [9], literature shows a lack of effcient and integrated approaches for handling healthcare service planning at strategic-tactical level [10,11]. Existing approaches are often time-consuming, subjective, and sensitive to the size and * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: a.stefanini@ing.unipi.it (A. Stefanini), davide.aloini@unipi.it (D. Aloini), elisabetta.benevento@students.uniroma2.eu (E. Benevento), riccardo. dulmin@ing.unipi.it (R. Dulmin), valeria.mininno@ing.unipi.it (V. Mininno). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Socio-Economic Planning Sciences journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/seps https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2019.100744 Received 9 January 2019; Received in revised form 27 August 2019; Accepted 30 September 2019