Abstract
The management systems currently used in the Italian healthcare sector provide fragmented and incomplete information on this system and are generally unlikely to give accurate information on the performances of the healthcare processes. The present paper introduces a combined discrete event simulation (DES)/business process management (BPM) approach as innovative means to study the workflow of the activities within the Department of Laboratory Medicine of the “San Paolo” Hospital in Naples (Italy). After a first “As-Is” analysis to identify the current workflows of the system and to gather information regarding its behaviour, a following DES-based “What-If” analysis is implemented to figure out alternative work hypotheses in order to highlight possible modifications to the system’s response under varying operating conditions and improve its overall performances. The structure of the simulation program is explained and the results of the scenario analysis are discussed. The paper starts with a brief exploration of the use of DES in healthcare and ends with general observations on the subject.
Highlights
Italian healthcare organizations operate in a dynamic context, characterized by considerable organizational andHow to cite this paper: Torri, A., Tamburis, O., Abbate, T. and Pepino, A. (2015) New Perspectives for Workflow Analysis in the Health Italian Sector through Discrete Event Simulation: The Case of a Department of Laboratory Medicine
The analysis of the results shows that discrete event simulation (DES)’s approach realized a quantitative estimation of the different types of resources involved in the activities of the DLM, leading to reveal the corresponding cost for each category, as well as the real costs related to the use of resources
The increase of resources utilization affected more significantly the scenario #1: the introduction of the new asset made evident a general positive effect especially for what concerns the Clinical Chemistry (CC)-related resources, the others showing no differences between the two scenarios
Summary
The case study examined relates to the Department of Laboratory Medicine of the “San Paolo” Hospital in Naples (Italy), whose management methodology suffered from: staleness of data: the results of the business management activities were tied to a specific period in the past, corrective actions were based on past information and it was difficult to get real-time feedback regarding the effectiveness of such actions; weakness of stored data: the stored data were often incomplete, inaccurate and not related to the work activities carried out within the health service.
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