Monday, January 07, 2008

Nice work from the docs and geeks

A note from two of our doctors to share with you. This is nice work, reflecting the kind of interdisciplinary approach to research that is possible in academic medical centers.

Dear Paul,

We thought the attached study [here is the abstract] from our group in the BIDMC Department of Neonatology and the Division of Clinical Computing might be of interest given your focus on assessing health care system performance. This paper uses computer based simulation techniques to examine how change brought on by the availability of new technology affects clinical outcomes, system performance and costs in a regionally distributed system of health care. The specific care technology examined is the use of induced hypothermia for the treatment of asphyxiated infants.

Although these approaches have long been used in other industries to identify optimal strategies to improve costs, quality and efficiency they have only rarely been applied to health care. We believe this modeling paradigm has great promise in studying how health systems respond to change brought on by policy decisions, the availability of new technologies, or natural/man-made disasters.

We hope you find it of interest.

Regards
Jim Gray and John Zupancic

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I know zip about 'discrete event simulation', but if it works when more widely applied and I am understanding it correctly, this is truly an exciting development. I was just discussing with someone yesterday that if we really performed all of the comparative effectiveness research that needs to be done,(or, in this case, comparative implementation research) it would take decades and not reach clinicians in a useful time frame. Perhaps this is the "shortcut" to
accomplishing that task.