Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Business Administration, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain.
Department of Industrial Organization, School of Engineering (TECNUN), University of Navarra, San Sebastian, Spain.
Health Care Manag Sci. 2020 Mar;23(1):66-79. doi: 10.1007/s10729-018-9466-2. Epub 2019 Jan 3.
We study the efficiency of operations management in a hospital from the dynamics of the flow of patients. Our principal aim is to characterize strategic departments and seasonal patterns in a hospital from a complex networks approach. Process mining techniques are developed to track out-patients' pathways along different departments for the purpose of building weekly networks. In these networks, departments act as nodes with multiple out/in-going arrows connecting other departments. Strategic departments are classified into target and critical departments. On the one hand, target departments, which in this study belong to the oncology area, correspond to those affected by new management policies whose impact is to be assessed. On the other hand, critical departments correspond to the most active departments, the hubs of the networks. Using suitable networks parameters, strategic departments are shown to be highly efficient regardless of the season, which naturally translates into a high level of service offered to patients. In addition, our results show conformance with the new objectives concerning target departments. The methodology presented is shown to be successful in evaluating the efficiency of hospital services in order to enhance process performances, and moreover, it is suitable to be implemented in healthcare management systems at a greater scale and the service industry whenever the flow of clients or customers are involved.
我们从患者流量的动态角度研究医院的运营管理效率。我们的主要目的是从复杂网络方法的角度来描述医院的战略部门和季节性模式。开发了流程挖掘技术来跟踪患者在不同科室的就诊路径，以便构建每周网络。在这些网络中，科室作为节点，有多个进出箭头连接其他科室。战略科室分为目标科室和关键科室。一方面，目标科室（在本研究中属于肿瘤学领域）对应于受新管理政策影响的科室，需要评估其影响。另一方面，关键科室对应于最活跃的科室，是网络的枢纽。使用合适的网络参数，可以看出战略科室无论在哪个季节都具有很高的效率，这自然转化为为患者提供的高水平服务。此外，我们的结果与目标科室的新目标一致。所提出的方法被证明可成功评估医院服务的效率，以提高流程绩效，并且无论涉及客户或客户流量，它都适合在更大规模的医疗保健管理系统和服务行业中实施。
