Evaluation and configuration of a care network for chemotherapy at home

International audienceIn our work, a decision support tool has been proposed for the home-based chemotherapy management in which the patient treatment process is spread over three consecutive days. Our approach is composed of a complete patient treatment process modeling, together with a set of simulation scenarios in order to perform suitability test of the theoretical treatment process model. The discrete-event simulation model takes into account not only the resources mobilization and their availability scheduling, but also the uncertainty of accomplishment dates for some activities and decisions fulfilled by non-staff participants (i.e. Biological laboratory, family doctor, ICL pharmacy...). The performance indicators measure, on the one hand, the model robustness, the decision making efficiency and the treatment costs, and, on the other hand, the capability of rescheduling chemotherapy cure process. . This model evaluates different configurations of the material and human resources in terms of workload variation and resource availability scheduling. The simulation results highlight that there exists an optimal resource configuration which can improve the organization of Chemotherapy At Home. Therefore, the results of this work can be used as a reference for decision makers in order to optimize the process design, to give some preventive advices before project implementation, and to redesign their organization. In future work, we are about to accompany the project implementation through the application of our decision support tool in the care network