Distributed Situation Awareness in Patient Flow Management: An Admission Case Study

Abstract

Managing patient flow can be an effective strategy to reduce idling hospital beds, thereby lowering the healthcare cost without sacrificing quality of care. However, improving patient flow can be a major challenge due to the complex patterns of communication across diverse hospital staff. To identify improvement opportunities, this paper investigates whether the Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA) framework can feasibly and meaningfully model Situation Awareness (SA) in patient flow. The investigation involved a case study on modeling the DSA of the admission phase in patient flow for a level 1 trauma center. A DSA model combining task, knowledge, and social networks was created, showing feasibility of the framework in depicting the distribution and transaction of knowledge across workers and information systems. Further, a true elective admission case was mapped onto the DSA model, verifying its practical merits.