Improving Discharge Process at the University of Wisconsin Hospital: A System-Theoretic Method

This paper introduces a system-theoretic approach to improve inpatient discharge process at the University of Wisconsin (UW) Hospital. The complex hospital discharge process is modeled by a stochastic process with parallel subprocesses, splits, merges, and reworks. Then, a stochastic analysis method is introduced to evaluate the performance of discharge. Specifically, the waiting and service times are characterized by gamma distributions, and an efficient algorithm is presented to aggregate the multiple interacting subprocesses and calculate the mean, variability, and discharge-time performance, i.e., the probability to discharge a patient within a desired or given time interval. High accuracy in performance evaluation is obtained by using such a method. To improve the discharge process at UW Hospital, bottleneck and what-if analyses are carried out and improvement recommendations are discussed.