Past studies have shown that there are communication and coordination delays that can disrupt delivery of care to the patient on the day of surgery. Hospitals have introduced information technology to improve the ability of staff to react in a timely fashion, but with mixed success. The research team is developing a mobile application that tracks patient progress, allowing staff to retrieve/send status instantly, and provide updates to others responsible for specific patients. In this paper, the researchers present how a detailed day-of-surgery simulation model (previously used for process improvement) has been integrated to communicate with the mobile app to provide day-of-surgery scenarios for user-testing the app at the hospital. This advancement in simulation capability is expected to provide significant research benefits resulting from the ability to test the app's usability and train staff without having to disrupt the actual delivery of care.
['Kevin Taaffe', 'Nazanin Zinouri', 'Aditya Ganesh Kamath']
Integrating simulation modeling and mobile technology to improve day-of-surgery patient care