Application of Digital Twin and Heuristic Computer Reasoning to Workflow Management: Gastroenterology Outpatient Centers Study

The workflow in a large medical procedural suite is characterized by high variability of input and suboptimum throughput. Today, Electronic Health Record systems do not address the problem of workflow efficiency: there is still high frustration from medical staff who lack real-time awareness and need to act in response of events based on their personal experiences rather than anticipating. In a medical procedural suite, there are many nonlinear coupling mechanisms between individual tasks that could wrong and therefore is difficult for any individual to control the workflow in real-time or optimize it in the long run. We propose a system approach by creating a digital twin of the procedural suite that assimilates Electronic Health Record data and supports the process of making rational, data-driven, decisions to optimize the workflow on a continuous basis. In this paper, we focus on long-term improvements of gastroenterology outpatient centers as a prototype example and use six months of data acquisition in two different clinical sites to validate the artificial intelligence algorithms.