Modeling and integration of hospital information systems with Petri nets

While the use of information technologies is becoming increasingly widespread in healthcare organizations, such as large hospitals, to date these organizations lack unified information systems providing a comprehensive view of the organization's state. We define a technique for building formal models capturing the state of hospital departments and the interactions among departments during hospital operations. These models, based on Petri nets, will support a variety of management and decision-support tools, such as statistical analysis, simulation, and dynamic reconfiguration. These models are at the core of a new software prototype that we are developing for the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago.