MODELING AND SIMULATING DYNAMIC HEALTHCARE PRACTICES

Eugene Santos Jr.(a), Keum Joo Kim(a), Fei Yu(a), Deqing Li(a), Phoebe Arbogast(b), Elizabeth A. Jacob(a), Joseph Rosen(b)

(a) Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Engineering, 8000 Cummings Hall, Hanover, NH 03755-8000, USA - esj@dartmouth.edu
(b) Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center One Medical Center Drive, Lebanon, NH 03756, USA - joseph.Rosen@dartmouth.edu

ABSTRACT

Recent research has been undertaken to reduce medical errors and to prevent adverse events that may result from unsafe and insecure situations in complex healthcare practices. Integration of individuals into teams is one of the most challenging but promising issues in the research. Modeling and simulating the complex, dynamic healthcare practices are useful to train individual team members, and subsequently enhance individual and team competencies to boost team performance. In this paper, we propose a methodology to model and simulate dynamic medical situations in healthcare practices by integrating gap analysis with intent inferencing. In intent inferencing, individuals’ goals are deduced from their perceptions and observations, and collective intent of individuals is evaluated through gap analysis. As the vast majority of services in healthcare are delivered by a group of individuals, enabling the individuals to figure out the best decision for the patient beyond existing limitations is expected to improve the quality of care significantly. Keywords: healthcare team, medical procedure, intent inferencing, decision making, gap analysis