Hospital Reorganization: How to Help Decision Makers? a Decision Support Software for the Surgical Suite Reengineering

This paper proposes a global and complete decision support tool able to help decision makers in the reengineering of a surgical suite. Under increasing economic pressure and subject to rapid evolutions of technology and surgical protocols, hospitals have to consider radical organisational changes to ensure continuous efficiency. Recent findings in enterprise modelling highlight the importance of having a global, complete and ‘generic’ model to support the design of a new surgical suite. In another field, researches on decision support tool using discreet event simulation and optimisation techniques mostly focus on specific reengineering issues (i.e., number of operating rooms, PACU beds, efficiency of the surgical planning) without addressing globally the challenges related to overall efficiency of the surgical suite. The decision support platform that has been developed is based on a ‘generic’ surgical suit model able to evaluate the impact of hospital managers’ choices during each phase of the reengineering project thanks to a discreet even simulation kernel. Created from the experience of five private and public hospitals and using an automatic generation of simulation models, this decision support tool exceeds the limits of currents simulation models and offers a full adaptability to a large variability of hospital practices. Following several steps, this approach supports strategic choices about infrastructure, and enables to progressively define the surgical suite functioning by assessing the impact of choices related to peripheral resources, support processes and personnel organisation.