From data to processes — Use of modeling and simulation in healthcare

Widespread adoption of HealthIT and eHealth systems has resulted in exponential growth of health related data that can be computationally processed and analyzed. Many healthcare organizations are adopting computational data analysis techniques and integrating results into Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems for improving care delivery. However, data analysis alone cannot give insight into healthcare systems that are rapidly evolving into complex and dynamic system of systems. Every data is produced and/or consumed by an underlying process. Thus, to improve healthcare from the perspective of cost and patient safety, we also need approaches for modeling and analyzing possibly concurrent processes with constraints on resources and exhibiting synchronous and asynchronous interactions. This paper focuses on the use of Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) for healthcare process modeling and analysis.