Visualization for Quality Healthcare: Patient Flow Exploration

The health and medical institutes and hospitals are facing several challenges in the short and long term, i.e. demographic changes, demands on improving quality, limited resources and cost requirements. To cope with these challenges, the health care sector needs to become more efficient, while maintaining and improving the quality of care. Efficient and transparent information flow across the whole system plays a key role even in this context. Being able to analyze the patient flows as the first step will provide the possibility to more efficiently manage medical resources and better serve incoming patients. In this work, we have developed a web-based portal for interactive analysis of patient flow data to assist hospital authorities to improve and optimize the time and quality of the provided services. The developed tool facilitates short and long term optimization of resource allocation by analyzing the past, as well as current, patient flows, identifying bottlenecks and exploring the reasons for the occurred waiting times.