MODELING AND SIMULATION OF A TERRITORIAL HEALTH CARE SERVICE (HCS): PATIENTS VS HCS MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE

Nowadays the increase of healthcare costs leads to the need to control healthcare expenditure and to assure high service quality. Methods and techniques adopted in the industrial systems’ context can be adopted to develop innovative operational practices in management of Health-Care Systems (HCSs). This paper is developed under the Research Project of National Interest (PRIN-2007) “Innovation of Healthcare Service Networks by using Supply Chain Management Techniques”. The aim of the project is to support public decision makers to face with the main problems of health-social network coordination problems among various Local Healthcare Agency (LHA) structures. This paper introduces a new approach based on a patient-center perspective aiming to model territorial healthcare service networks in order to analyze their efficiency in term of resource allocation and usage. A model able to evaluate the interaction among different service units belonging to the same network is proposed in order to support public decision makers to face with the design of healthcare network. The paper focuses on three features: to define the burdens of a territorial network and its characteristics; to classify the services provided and the interactions among them; to define the performance indicators of each service based on the most critical resources usage and on the quality of the service provided. Finally, preliminary results concerning a first model application to the LHA of Brindisi (in the Apulia Region) are presented.