Modeling Patient Journeys for Demand Segments in Chronic Care, With an Illustration to Type 2 Diabetes

Chronic care is an important area for cost-effective and efficient health service delivery. Matching demand and services for chronic care is not easy as patients may have different needs in different stages of the disease. More insight is needed into the complete patient journey to do justice to the services required in each stage of the disease, to the different experiences of patients in each part of the journey, and to outcomes in each stage. With patient journey we refer to the “journey” of the patient along the services received within a demand segment of chronic care. We developed a generic framework for describing patient journeys and provider networks, based on an extension of the well-known model of Donabedian, to relate demand, services, resources, behavior, and outcomes. We also developed a generic operational model for the detailed modeling of services and resources, allowing for insight into costs. The generic operational model can be tailored to the specific characteristics of patient groups. We applied this modeling approach to type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients. Diabetes care is a form of chronic care for patients suffering diabetes mellitus. We studied the performance of T2D networks, using a descriptive model template. To identify and describe demand we made use of the following demand segments within the diabetes type 2 population: patients targeted for prevention; patients with stage 1 diabetes treated by their GP with lifestyle advice; patients with diabetes stage 2 treated by their GP with lifestyle advice and oral medication; patients with stage 3 diabetes treated by their GP with lifestyle advice, oral medication, and insulin injections; patients with stage 4 diabetes with complications (treated by internal medicine specialists). We used a Markov model to describe the transitions between the different health states. The model enables the patient journey through the health care system for cohorts of newly diagnosed T2D patients to be described, and to make a projection of the resource requirements of the different demand segments over the years. We illustrate our approach with a case study on a T2D care network in The Netherlands and reflect on the role of demand segmentation to analyse the case study results, with the objective of improving the T2D service delivery

The validity of the EQ-5D-3L items: An investigation with type 2 diabetes patients from six European countries

Background: Most previous studies concerning the validity of the EQ-5D-3L items refer to applications of only a single language version of the EQ-5D-3L in only one country. Therefore, there is little information concerning the extent to which the results can be generalised across different language versions and

Capacity management of nursing staff as a vehicle for organizational improvement

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Capacity management systems create insight into required resources like staff and equipment. For inpatient hospital care, capacity management requires information on beds and nursing staff capacity, on a daily as well as annual basis. This paper presents a comprehensive capacity model that gives insight into required nursing staff capacity and opportunities to improve capacity utilization on a ward level.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A capacity model was developed to calculate required nursing staff capacity. The model used historical bed utilization, nurse-patient ratios, and parameters concerning contract hours to calculate beds and nursing staff needed per shift and the number of nurses needed on an annual basis in a ward. The model was applied to three different capacity management problems on three separate groups of hospital wards. The problems entailed operational, tactical, and strategic management issues: optimizing working processes on pediatric wards, predicting the consequences of reducing length of stay on nursing staff required on a cardiology ward, and calculating the nursing staff consequences of merging two internal medicine wards.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>It was possible to build a model based on easily available data that calculate the nursing staff capacity needed daily and annually and that accommodate organizational improvements. Organizational improvement processes were initiated in three different groups of wards. For two pediatric wards, the most important improvements were found to be improving working processes so that the agreed nurse-patient ratios could be attained. In the second case, for a cardiology ward, what-if analyses with the model showed that workload could be substantially lowered by reducing length of stay. The third case demonstrated the possible savings in capacity that could be achieved by merging two small internal medicine wards.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A comprehensive capacity model was developed and successfully applied to support capacity decisions on operational, tactical, and strategic levels. It appeared to be a useful tool for supporting discussions between wards and hospital management by giving objective and quantitative insight into staff and bed requirements. Moreover, the model was applied to initiate organizational improvements, which resulted in more efficient capacity utilization.</p

Using historical bed utilization to calculate the number of nurses needed per shift

<p><b>Copyright information:</b></p><p>Taken from "Capacity management of nursing staff as a vehicle for organizational improvement"</p><p>http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/7/196</p><p>BMC Health Services Research 2007;7():196-196.</p><p>Published online 30 Nov 2007</p><p>PMCID:PMC2228295.</p><p></p