Modeling and estimating the spatial distribution of healthcare workers

This paper describes a spatial model for healthcare workers' location in a large hospital facility. Such models have many applications in healthcare, such as supporting timeand-motion efficiency studies to improve healthcare delivery, or modeling the spread of hospital-acquired infections. We use our model to estimate spatial distributions for healthcare workers in The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC), a 700-bed comprehensive academic medical center spanning a total of 3.2 million square feet and employing about 8,000 healthcare workers. We model the UIHC as a metric space induced by walking distance between pairs of rooms, and with each room having a level of attractiveness representing the activity level in that room. We combine this with a model in which each healthcare worker has a center of activity and a probability density function that decays polynomially as we move away from the center. Using 12 million Electronic Medical Record (EMR) logins collected over...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IHI
• Authors: Donald Ephraim Curtis, Christopher S. Hlady, Sriram V. Pemmaraju, Philip Polgreen, Alberto Maria Segre
• Keywords: Healthcare, Healthcare Worker, IHI 2010, Model, Model Parameters