Provision of healthcare services is one of the largest and most complex industries worldwide. In fact, the major share of health related expenditures in most countries is used for running and building hospitals (WHO Statistical Information System, Department of Health UK, American Hospital Association 2004). The major role of these hospitals is to deliver healthcare services to individual patients in the form of prevention, and treatment services. However, increasing load of patient demand for healthcare services has forced hospital administration to employ new ways of improving the efficiency of hospitals. Recently, researchers in the area of healthcare improvement have advocated the use of systems engineering concepts such as knowledge acquisition, modeling of business processes, simulation & analysis of complex systems in healthcare service delivery improvement (National Academy of Engineering & Institute of Medicine, 2005). Therefore, this research deals with developing efficient healthcare service delivery in hospitals.

Increasing the healthcare process efficiency involves several challenges including optimum allocation and utilization of resources such as medical staffs, machines, beds and equipments; reduced non-productive time periods such as patient waiting time; removal of bottleneck processes for example longer registration process; and defining standard care pathways and streamlined patient flow across the hospital. In order to tackle these issues increasingly importance and attention are being placed on improving hospital workflows to meet essential medical and economic target. Therefore, this research provides a new logical and systematic framework of methods to deal with service delivery process improvement.  The overall research proposed in this area is undertaken in the course of the doctoral training and is illustrated in Fig. 1.  

Figure 1 illustrates the research roadmap having 5 tasks to be completed in 3 three years time period. During the first year of PhD, Tasks 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 are to be completed which will focus on the systematic improvements in hospital based on static models of the system. In second year, the main focus of research will be to utilize the knowledge developed from static modeling to develop dynamic model of the system such as discrete event simulation model and suggest improvements (Tasks 2, 3). In third year, the main motive will be to define, measure and improve the productivity of complex medical devices such as CT, MRI (Tasks 4. 5). In addition, the impact of workflow on productivity of devices will be studied and improvement areas will be suggested. The red dashed boxes contain areas which will be of future research which will build on this research.

 

1.    Business process modeling of service delivery processes from hospital staff interviews [Task 1.1]
2.    Deriving knowledge from electronic tracking database to represent and analyze different care pathways [Task 1.3].
3.    Developing integrated knowledge acquisition framework for improvement based on staff interviews and electronic tracking of patients, staffs, and equipments [Tasks 1.1, 1.2, 1.3].
4.    Developing discrete event simulation model based on integrated knowledge framework for workflow assessment [Task 2, 3]
5.    Assessment of impact of complex equipments such as CT, MRI on the overall productivity of the hospital department [Task 4].