TITLE:
New Perspectives for Workflow Analysis in the Health Italian Sector through Discrete Event Simulation: The Case of a Department of Laboratory Medicine
AUTHORS:
Adriano Torri, Oscar Tamburis, Teresa Abbate, Alessandro Pepino
KEYWORDS:
Healthcare Management, Performance Evaluation, Discrete Event Simulation, Business Process Management, Department of Laboratory Medicine
JOURNAL NAME:
Intelligent Information Management,
Vol.7 No.3,
April
30,
2015
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.