HC Data-based Research on Patient Flow

Ample operational challenges arise in health care settings such as hospitals, clinics, and emergency situations, with “Patient Flow” serving as a common thread. The importance of patient flow has been acknowledged by the medical community, due to its impact on equitable accessibility to healthcare resources, quality and cost of care processes and, last but not the least, patient satisfaction. As an example, Standard LD.3.10.10, set by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations (JCAHO (2004)) for patient flow leadership, requires that leaders "develop and implement plans to identify and mitigate impediments to efficient patient flow throughout the hospital.”

The goals of the "Patient Flow" working group are in concert with the JCAHO standard: starting with data, it will seek to identify the critical factors that impact patient flow; it will then create and disseminate scientific and engineering theories and tools, in support of tracking, monitoring, and improving such flows.

Ideally and credibly, research directions better fuse multi-disciplinary contributions of healthcare professionals (physicians, administrators), statisticians and operation researchers. To this end, and due to its size, the group is likely to divide into subgroups, which could focus on topics such as those listed below. A more concrete list will be created during the first meeting of the working group (Wednesday, September 12th, at 2pm), and subsequently change and evolve according to group member preferences.

List (initial, preliminary): accommodating Individual patient (outcome) in operational models; patient flow characteristics in queueing models (e.g. time-varying; fork-join constructs, extended to Petri nets); fairness, to patients and “servers"; shared healthcare simulation modules; white paper(s), research proposal(s).