The scientific paper titled “Federated I-PALIA: Privacy-By-Design Distributed Process Discovery for Duplicated Activities in Healthcare”, led by researchers from the SABIEN group at the ITACA Institute of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), has received the Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Workshop on Process Mining Applications for Healthcare (PM4H25), held on 26 June 2025 in the Italian city of Pavia.

The research was developed by Carlos Fernández-Llatas, Gema Ibáñez Sánchez and Zoe Valero Ramón, SABIEN-ITACA group, in collaboration with Leonardo Nucciarelli, Erica Tavazzi, Roberto Gatta, Andrada Mihaela Tudor, Mauro Vallati, and Andrea Damiani—researchers at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome—with whom the group has maintained an active collaboration for several years, including exchanges of doctoral students.

The article presents an innovative approach to distributed process discovery that is privacy-preserving by design and aimed at detecting duplicated activities in healthcare environments.

“This paper continues the SABIEN-ITACA group’s research on the development of the I-PALIA algorithm, which uses artificial intelligence techniques to automatically discover clinical processes from event logs recorded in hospital information systems. The first version of this algorithm was already recognised with the same award at the 2023 Rome edition of the PODS4H conference,” explains Carlos Fernández-Llatas.

What is PM4H25?

PM4H25 is a leading international event focused on the application of process mining in the healthcare sector. Its goal is to promote knowledge exchange between researchers and professionals regarding techniques and best practices for improving healthcare processes using real-world data.

This edition featured seven scientific papers, a poster session and a roundtable discussion on current and future challenges in the sector.

The PM4H conference, together with its sister event PODS4H, is the main international forum organised by the Process-Oriented Data Science for Healthcare (PODS4H Alliance)—the world’s largest research network in this emerging field.

This scientific alliance, officially recognised by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining, is the only one focused specifically on applying process mining technologies to healthcare.

«This recognition highlights the pioneering role of the ITACA Institute in developing innovative, process mining–based solutions to enhance efficiency and quality in healthcare systems», concludes Carlos Fernández Llatas.