SIMULATION ANALYSIS OF PATIENT FLOW MANAGEMENT USING ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS

Abstract

This project aims to improve the patient ow in the queues in crowded hospitals of developing countries, using portable electronic health records. Transforming government hospitals towards digitization has its own challenges due to high footfall of patients which results in huge data size. Queue management is very challenging task as the queue is not followed, there is corruption and instances of identity fraud coupled with poor manage- ment of patients' records. Portable electronic healthcare records facilitates high availabil- ity and high reliability as they provide real time access to patients records at point of care. Portable health records are highly bene cial in hospitals, especially in case of developing countries where people visit di erent hospitals for di erent specialists. Portable EHRs has the capability to strengthen the relationship between patients and physicians. The meaningful readily available updated data will help health service providers in making insightful decisions and will eventually lead to better services for patients. With portable EHR (Electronic Health Records) a patient can have his records with him all the time on a smart phone or a smart card. This leads to e cient maintenance, faster service rate of doctors and also help in eliminating any errors on pharmacists side. Also to ensure in- teroperability across hospitals, we have proposed FHIR(Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) based electronic healthcare records. The initial patient ow model is gen- erated considering the general current work ow of the government hospitals. On the basis of analysis of current ow of patients, we propose an e cient work ow scheme to improve the patient ow further. We have proposed a smart digital kiosk based registration process which is based on using of portable smart cards. The smart and e cient healthcare system proposed by us, along with reducing waiting time for patients also ensure authenticity of patients' identity. We have simulated, compared and anaylsed both present system and proposed system design on Matlab and have found through simulation results that proposed system performs better in many dimensions. It has improved the scheduling process and help the department to re ne the work procedure for better service quality and e cient utilization of resources.