A real-time knowledge-based decission support system for health care quality improvement using discrete event simulation techniques

The quality of health care is increasingly receiving more and more emphases in almost all developed countries. Traditional health care Quality Assurance (QA) models have always been implemented in retrospect depending heavily on surveys. The objective of this research is to develop a novel and more reliable approach to the monitoring and improvement of health care quality. This approach is based on a real-time simulation system that monitors a Health Care Quality Index (HCQI). This system will map the HCQI which is a function of process factors (e.g. waiting time), against the patients' expectations and hence give health care managers the 'local' information needed to continuously adjust performance without waiting for an annual survey. Being a real-time system, managers will have the ability to run fast-forward simulation to help predict future demands and make decisions accordingly. This will be a key to Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) in health care.