SHARE: A Tool to Analyze and Assess Strategies in Health Care Organization Management

Abstract

In health care organizations, management of both human and material resources implies decision making. When seemingly equivalent strategies are possible, simulation can help to make a decision on better grounds. The SHARE workframe was designed to address the specificities of health care and to provide a comprehensive environment for modelling and simulating health care processes. The typology of objects is defined as Actors, subdivided in Clients and Resources and Elementary Operations. Graphical tools allow us to build processes from these objects and to create their relationships. Various strategies based on either clinical or managerial changes may be investigated. After a simulation, graphical tools allow us to display summary information on the utilization of all actors, waiting times, and goodness of execution. The use of SHARE is exemplified with the analysis and simulation of changes in the Pulmonary Function Testing Laboratory of the Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris.