Medical services are usually provided in a world of limited resources. For this reason it becomes vitally important to manage these resources in a flexible way, in order to have their efficient allocation/reallocation and use. Health care managers have need to predict demographic and health status tendencies and use them as a base for operating decisions as well as for planning the best use of these resources, using cost/efficiency indicators depending on prefixed budgets. They must define aims, choose standards, allocate resources and finally analyse the results obtained. One of the difficulties in planning and organizing health care services regards the definition of the interventation priority, the allocation/reallocation of resources (human and material), the proposition, the organisation and the management of alternative solutions and the evaluation of the attended results as health care impact on the population. In order to analyze in quantitative terms the different possibilities, it is necessary to use laborious and complex calculations and recalculations; by the computers the time and the effort required for this analysis (simulations, scenarios, etc.) can be drastically reduced and made easier, also by the use of Decision Support Systems. At present the role of the Geographical Information Systems (which we will henceforth call GIS) in implementing the procedurally model of decision making in resource allocation is foremost the research for suitable alternatives, but also helping the decision makers to assign priority weights to decision criteria, evaluate the suitable alternatives, and visualize the results of choice. They have a geographical database and, generally, a set of technical facilities such as, for example, user friendly interfaces by which it is possible to define, store, browse and query the data which are in such a GIS. Often spreadsheets and statistical databases and packages are usefully integrated to the system. The tool used to support the health care system is a GIS, called Scenario, which uses an object oriented methodology and allows to define the user dictionaries (you have to think to the possibility to use this tool in different contexts: a service, a department, a hospital, a Local Health Unit, a district, etc. as well as in an advanced industrially country or in a developing country). It allows also to acquire and store heterogeneous thematic information (ethnic, geographic, epidemiological, etc.). In the organizational model of the health care structures, Scenario defines which and how many resources have to be allocated (or reallocated) in the hospital or in the health care structure considered. In fact, the system is able to apply optimization algorhythms and, successively, to use its Decision Support System (DSS) to define in which way the existing resources (or new resources) have to be reallocated (or allocated). In the proposed organizational model, the health care system is structured in resources deployed in an hospital and each resource can in turn be structured in services in order to represent all the activity types which refer to such a resource (health, environmental, educational, financial, etc.). The performance of the system relates the results to the initial situation and the activities implemented by the various structural elements. The budget is divided among the different resources by the DSS depending on predefined parameters (age-ranges, sex, handicap, etc.). The optimization processes maximize the cost-benefit rate and define in output, for each resource type, the number of entities to allocate to the activity which is function of the resource.
The allocation of hospital resources by a Geographic Information System|[L'allocazione di risorse ospedaliere mediante un sistema informativo geografico]
Rafanelli M;
1996
Abstract
Medical services are usually provided in a world of limited resources. For this reason it becomes vitally important to manage these resources in a flexible way, in order to have their efficient allocation/reallocation and use. Health care managers have need to predict demographic and health status tendencies and use them as a base for operating decisions as well as for planning the best use of these resources, using cost/efficiency indicators depending on prefixed budgets. They must define aims, choose standards, allocate resources and finally analyse the results obtained. One of the difficulties in planning and organizing health care services regards the definition of the interventation priority, the allocation/reallocation of resources (human and material), the proposition, the organisation and the management of alternative solutions and the evaluation of the attended results as health care impact on the population. In order to analyze in quantitative terms the different possibilities, it is necessary to use laborious and complex calculations and recalculations; by the computers the time and the effort required for this analysis (simulations, scenarios, etc.) can be drastically reduced and made easier, also by the use of Decision Support Systems. At present the role of the Geographical Information Systems (which we will henceforth call GIS) in implementing the procedurally model of decision making in resource allocation is foremost the research for suitable alternatives, but also helping the decision makers to assign priority weights to decision criteria, evaluate the suitable alternatives, and visualize the results of choice. They have a geographical database and, generally, a set of technical facilities such as, for example, user friendly interfaces by which it is possible to define, store, browse and query the data which are in such a GIS. Often spreadsheets and statistical databases and packages are usefully integrated to the system. The tool used to support the health care system is a GIS, called Scenario, which uses an object oriented methodology and allows to define the user dictionaries (you have to think to the possibility to use this tool in different contexts: a service, a department, a hospital, a Local Health Unit, a district, etc. as well as in an advanced industrially country or in a developing country). It allows also to acquire and store heterogeneous thematic information (ethnic, geographic, epidemiological, etc.). In the organizational model of the health care structures, Scenario defines which and how many resources have to be allocated (or reallocated) in the hospital or in the health care structure considered. In fact, the system is able to apply optimization algorhythms and, successively, to use its Decision Support System (DSS) to define in which way the existing resources (or new resources) have to be reallocated (or allocated). In the proposed organizational model, the health care system is structured in resources deployed in an hospital and each resource can in turn be structured in services in order to represent all the activity types which refer to such a resource (health, environmental, educational, financial, etc.). The performance of the system relates the results to the initial situation and the activities implemented by the various structural elements. The budget is divided among the different resources by the DSS depending on predefined parameters (age-ranges, sex, handicap, etc.). The optimization processes maximize the cost-benefit rate and define in output, for each resource type, the number of entities to allocate to the activity which is function of the resource.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
