Spatio-Temporal Patterns in Patient Arrivals and Wait Times

When regional healthcare service managers review the operations of healthcare services in a past period of time, they often feel confused about some of the unexpected spatio-temporal patterns in patient arrivals and wait times. How did these patterns emerge? What reasons and mechanisms account for the emerging patterns? How can patient arrivals be regulated at different hospitals and thus improve the service utilization in the region? In this chapter, we present how to use our proposed behavior-based autonomy-oriented modeling method to characterize the spatio-temporal patterns in cardiac surgery services in Ontario, Canada, with the aim of answering some of the aforementioned questions. The work shown in this chapter reveals the working mechanisms that explain how the spatio-temporal patterns in patient arrivals and wait times at a systems level emerge from individual patients’ hospital selection behavior and their interactions with hospital wait times. It also reveals that our proposed behavior-based autonomy-oriented modeling method is useful in finding the underlying reasons for emergent spatio-temporal patterns in complex healthcare systems.