Modeling and Optimizing Patient Flows

constructing a consistent process model and its simulation can be instrumental to be used in healthcare issues such as Consistent patient flow modeling. Current process modeling techniques used in healthcare are intuitive and imprecise such as flowcharts, unified modeling language activity diagram (UML AD) and business process modeling notation (BPMN). These techniques are vague in process description and cannot fully capture the complexities of the types of activities and types of temporal constraints between them. Additionally, to schedule patient flows; current modeling techniques does not offer any mechanism so healthcare relies on critical path method(CPM) and program evaluation review technique (PERT) that also have limitations i.e. finish-start barrier. It is imperative that temporal constraints between the start and/or end of a process needs to be specified, e.g., the start of A precedes the start (or end) of B, etc., however, these approaches failed to provide us with a mechanism for handling these temporal situations. This paper proposes a framework that provides enumeration of core concepts to describe a general knowledge base for Business and Healthcare domains. Algorithms are provided to represent the semantics of concepts i.e. based on their ontology. Furthermore, this logical basis is supported by Point graph (PG); a graphical tool, which has a formal translation to a point interval temporal logic (PITL) is used to simulate Patient flows for enhanced reasoning and correct representation. We will briefly evaluate an illustrative discharge patient flow example initially modeled using Unified Modeling Language Activity Diagram (UML AD) with the intention to compare with the technique presented here for its potential use to model patient flows