The Regional Healthcare Ecosystem Analyst (RHEA): a simulation modeling tool to assist infectious disease control in a health system

As healthcare systems continue to expand and interconnect with each other through patient sharing, administrators, policy makers, infection control specialists, and other decision makers may have to take account of the entire healthcare 'ecosystem' in infection control. We developed a soft...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 2013-06, Vol.20 (e1), p.e139-e146
Main Authors: Lee, Bruce Y, Wong, Kim F, Bartsch, Sarah M, Yilmaz, S Levent, Avery, Taliser R, Brown, Shawn T, Song, Yeohan, Singh, Ashima, Kim, Diane S, Huang, Susan S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
California
Computer Simulation
Delivery of Health Care - organization & administration
Hospital Administration
Humans
Infection Control - methods
Research and Applications
Software
Staphylococcus aureus
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Summary:As healthcare systems continue to expand and interconnect with each other through patient sharing, administrators, policy makers, infection control specialists, and other decision makers may have to take account of the entire healthcare 'ecosystem' in infection control. We developed a software tool, the Regional Healthcare Ecosystem Analyst (RHEA), that can accept user-inputted data to rapidly create a detailed agent-based simulation model (ABM) of the healthcare ecosystem (ie, all healthcare facilities, their adjoining community, and patient flow among the facilities) of any region to better understand the spread and control of infectious diseases. To demonstrate RHEA's capabilities, we fed extensive data from Orange County, California, USA, into RHEA to create an ABM of a healthcare ecosystem and simulate the spread and control of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Various experiments explored the effects of changing different parameters (eg, degree of transmission, length of stay, and bed capacity). Our model emphasizes how individual healthcare facilities are components of integrated and dynamic networks connected via patient movement and how occurrences in one healthcare facility may affect many other healthcare facilities. A decision maker can utilize RHEA to generate a detailed ABM of any healthcare system of interest, which in turn can serve as a virtual laboratory to test different policies and interventions.
ISSN:1067-5027
1527-974X
DOI:10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001107