Resource Allocation in Healthcare: Implications of Scarce Resources and Temporal Constraints

Medical community has taken initial steps towards the computerization of clinical knowledge contained in clinical guidelines. However, often scarcity of clinical resources makes it impossible to carry out clinical guidelines, and the scarcity of resources may delay medical actions from a couple of days to months. A problem here is how to allocate resources among individual patients. In order to automate resource allocation we have extended computer-interpretable modeling languages by modeling primitives that can be used to express whether an action is more or less time critical. In addition, we have extended the expression power of clinical guideline modeling language by transactional features that enable that all required clinical resources for a clinical process can be reserved in an atomic way. This model also minimizes the efforts required for undoing the effects of the canceled clinical reservations.