Healthcare Service Management

To show the practical effectiveness of the proposed systematic approach, this book provides a series of pilot studies within the context of cardiac care in Ontario, Canada. The exemplified studies have unveiled some novel findings, e.g., (1) service accessibility and education may relieve the pressure of population size on service utilization; (2) functionally coupled units may have a certain cross-unit wait-time relationship potentially because of a delay cascade phenomena; (3) strategically allocating time blocks in operating rooms (ORs) based on a feedback mechanism may benefit OR utilization; (4) patients' and hospitals' autonomous behavior, and their interactions via wait times may bear the responsible for the emergence of spatio-temporal patterns observed in the real-world cardiac care system. Furthermore, this book presents an intelligent healthcare decision support (iHDS) system, an integrated architecture for implementing the data-driven complex systems modeling approach to developing, analyzing, investigating, supporting and advising healthcare related decisions.In summary, this book provides a data-driven systematic approach for addressing practical decision-support problems confronted in healthcare service management. This approach will provide policy makers, researchers, and practitioners with a practically useful way for examining service utilization and service performance in various ``what-if" scenarios, inspiring the design of effectiveness resource-allocation strategies, and deepening the understanding of the nature of complex healthcare service systems.