Representing Medical Protocols for Organizational Simulation: An Information-Processing Approach

  • Authors:

  • Douglas B. Fridsma;Jan Thomsen

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Medicine, Section on Medical Informatics, 251 Campus Drive, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5479. E-mail: fridsma@smi.stanford.edu;Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Construction Engineering and Management Program, Stanford University School of Engineering, Stanford, CA 94305-4020. E-mail: jthom@leland.sta ...

  • Venue:
  • Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory
  • Year:
  • 1998

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Organizational simulations have been used in business,manufacturing, and engineering design tasks to gain insight intoorganizational process bottlenecks, and to improve the quality andefficiency of processes within these industries. As market pressures demandincreased efficiencies within the health care industry, organizationalsimulation techniques could provide similar insight into the design ofbetter medical care processes, or protocols, in medical organizations. Tosimulate the process of medical care within a specific organization however,requires models that can represent (1) unpredictable patient responses tocare, (2) the flexibility needed to adapt to different patients, and (3)different preferences of health care professionals and the implicitpreferences contained within the protocol. Using previous work on simulationin the Virtual Design Team (VDT), and an example protocol drawn from anexisting protocol in bone marrow transplantation, we describe extensions tothe VDT information-processing representation that will allow us to simulatethe performance characteristics of a medical protocol used within a medicalorganization. Our representational extensions capture the uncertainty ofmedical care for patients, the activity flexibility within the organization,and the preferences of health care professionals that will makeinformation-processing organizational simulations in the medical domainpossible. We believe our representation will provide a robust simulation“tool box” that can be used to investigate the performance ofspecific medical protocols within different hospital settings, and exploreorganizational theory within the health care industry.