Designing care pathways using simulation modeling and machine learning

The development of care pathways is increasingly becoming an instrumental artefact towards improving the quality of care and cutting costs. This paper presents a framework that incorporates Simulation Modeling along with Machine Learning (ML) for the purpose of designing pathways and evaluating the return on investment of implementation. The study goes through a use case in relation to elderly healthcare in Ireland, with a particular focus on the hip-fracture care scheme. Initially, unsupervised ML is utilized to extract knowledge from the Irish Hip Fracture Database. Data clustering is specifically applied to learn potential insights pertaining to patient characteristics, care-related factors, and outcomes. Subsequently, the data-driven knowledge is utilized within the process of simulation model development. Generally, the framework is conceived to provide a systematic approach for developing healthcare policies that help optimize the quality and cost of care.