Philanthropic hospitals in Brazil are in great part funded by the government and are daily accessed by a large portion of the population. As the Brazilian economy faces deep cuts in healthcare, managers are adjusting budgets and focusing on less expensive alternatives such as process improvements. Hospitals are even more impacted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic with widespread disruption on operational processes forcing them to stretch resources. Thus, it brings an opportunity to evaluate the actual performance of these settings under different scenarios where analysts may address bottlenecks and the impact on resources. Our focus is to quantify the capacity of an emergency department to support patient demand with limited resources in pre and postpandemic scenarios. We use a 12-month longitudinal dataset consisting of pre-pandemic emergency occurrences and assigned resources.
Cancer pathway is the name given to a patient's journey from initial suspicion of cancer through to a confirmed diagnosis and, if applicable, the definition of a treatment plan. Typically, a cancer patient will undergo a series of procedures, which we designate as events, during their cancer care. The initial stage of the pathway, from suspected diagnosis to confirmed diagnosis and start of a treatment is called cancer waiting time (CWT). This paper focuses on the modelling and analysis of the CWT. Health boards are under pressure to ensure that the duration of CWT satisfies predefined targets. In this paper, we first create the visual representation of the pathway obtained from real patient data at a given health board, and then compare it with the standardised pathway considered by the board to find and flag a deviation in the execution of the cancer pathway. Next, we devise a discrete event simulation model for the cancer waiting time pathway. The input data is obtained from historical records of patients. The outcomes from this analysis highlight the pathway bottlenecks and transition times which may be used to reveal potential improvements for CWT in the future.
Healthcare involves complex decision making from planning to resource management. Resources in hospitals are usually allocated by experienced managers, however, due to an inherent process complexity, decisions are surrounded by uncertainties, variabilities, and constraints. Information Systems must be robust enough to provide support to stakeholders, capable of controlling and support work flows. The present work explores the required synergy when combining business processes with discrete event simulation. The objective is to estimate performance indices and address capacity management of a surgical center as a case study.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations –citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.