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Optimizing Hospital Resources using Big Data Analytics with Standardized e-Clinical Pathways

In today’s overloaded and costly healthcare systems, more research focusing on hospital resource optimization is needed. Resource optimization can reduce costs and improve healthcare outcomes. Optimization can even save the lives of patients when resulting, for example, in more efficient time management in hospitals. Optimized time utilization frees caregivers for treating more patients and frees hospital testing rooms/beds for the high volumes of patients. Without caregivers and rooms, some patients may die while waiting for their turns. In this research, we show the importance of automated and fully digitized electronic Clinical Pathways (e-CPs) in the field of hospital resource optimization. This is because the full digitization of CPs provides the rich data needed for optimization and enables physicians and healthcare administrators to have control over the "micro" CP data that is missing in other health information systems. After addressing our novel CP automation framework, we illustrate our contribution to optimizing hospital resources through three scenarios. In the first scenario, we show how communicating the best CP practices can improve the efficiency of CPs and patient treatment, resulting in faster, lower-cost, and optimized healthcare provision for patients. Next, we address the issue of unnecessary blood tests ordered in hospitals and show how blood test cost/count analytics enables healthcare providers to reduce costs and optimize resources. The third scenario is related to time management. We illustrate how CP intervention time analytics can pinpoint sources of inefficient time management in hospitals. Optimizing hospital resources is an important research topic that has great effects on the cost and efficiency of our healthcare systems, as well as the safety and well-being of the whole society.