Short Description
Project 1 ‚Pathways of Service Utilisation‘ deals with the question, which pathway a sick patient is passed through the Austrian health-care system. Hereby bottlenecks and unusual structures in the system were identified. This information proved to be is of extreme value to the decision-makers in the health-care system. In addition, it was and is used to parameterise simulation models developed in Projects 3 and 5.
Objectives and Methods
Targets of this project can roughly be subdivided:
Determination of certain pathways or patients.
Although a huge amount of data is available, data-driven determination of pathways of care, i.e. the temporal sequence of health care service institutions a patient attends in case of sickness, poses a huge challenge due to heterogeneity of data. We used so called ICT-10 classification of diseases to classify certain pathways with diseases. Additionally highly resolved population models were employed to help analyse the pathways based on underlying population. And finally statistical methods, so called record-linkage techniques, were the most important tools to investigate pathways.
Development of decision-support tools for stakeholders & decision-makers.
Detected patient pathways of care and the problems and bottlenecks identified, needed to be communicated to the decision-makers. For this communication valid and simple tools, which are convincing, easily understood and well visualised needed to be implemented. Hence convincing visualisation of pathways was an important research topic here.
Pathway prognosis.
For the resource management, prognosis for different pathways of care is important information as they are directly linked to the expected occupancy of medical institutions. These prognoses were developed using simulation- and statistical-methods in cooperation with project 3 and 5.
Results
The main achievement of this project was the development of different pathway prognosis and visualisation tools. They provide information about the current and prognostic information about the current and expected occupancy of different health-care providers.