Developing a patient flow visualization and prediction model using aggregated data for a healthcare network cluster in Southwest Ethiopia

Author summary Predicting patient flow is essential for improving efficiency, resource allocation, and process optimization. However, the majority of existing literature targets exploring the length of stay, waiting time, treatment time, test turnaround time, and boarding time within a single healthcare institution and between different departments within the institution (i.e., intra-patient flow analysis). Whereas little is explored about the flow of patients with the network structure or organization. Our study tried to investigate the flow of patients in the Healthcare Network Cluster in Southwest Ethiopia, where healthcare is structured in a 3-tier fashion and the referral patient flow starts from the lower primary healthcare level to the secondary level on the way to the tertiary level or a specialized hospital. The inter-patient flow analysis can help identify areas for improvement in the coordination of care and the efficient use of resources by tracking the flow of patients from one primary healthcare provider to specialized care and analyzing the characteristics of that flow. Furthermore, our study only takes into account direct flow patients who use or follow the traditional healthcare system structure, not indirect flows or alternative forms of healthcare access.