Systematic platform design of a real time healthcare management system: Minimizing overall patient waiting time

摘要

This paper introduces a systematic engineering approach to modeling the hospital system as a comprehensive healthcare provider; other healthcare organizations (HCOs) are considered special cases of the hospital system (HS). The objective is to manage HCOs in real time, in a way to maintain an acceptable quality of care (QC) while reducing cost of care (CC). To achieve this, the HS is treated as a dynamical system, for which major Subsystems of healthcare that impact QC and CC are established, and then the relevant system state variables are identified. It will be shown that by minimizing unnecessary waiting time and prioritizing patients on the basis of certain clinical and nonclinical conditions, QC and CC can be improved and reduced, respectively. A key aspect of the proposed approach is in treating the patient in a HCO as a finite state machine. This simplifies the modeling problem to developing a structured finite state automaton, denoted as a Structured Patient Automaton. Examples are provided to shed lights on the proposed modeling approach and waiting time optimization.