About the project
This project will study the treatment and rehabilitation of stroke patients in Norway through statistical and simulation-based modelling.
STROKEMOD (and the precursor project Simulating patient flow and health care costs in Norway with its NOR-SPOT data collection) employs advanced data driven, statistical modelling of patient flows, drawing on queue theory and simulation modelling.
Method
We plan to make separate sub-models for the different phases of the disease:
- An Incidence model represents the random events of new stroke case s in the population. A Pre-hospital model represents the phase until hospitalization.
- A hospital’s stroke unit model represents internal queues, radiology and treatment processes.
- A rehabilitation model describes factors that govern the utilization of rehabilitation resources.
- A long-term care model represents duration and level of care, while a municipality model describes the local support that the patient receives.
Moreover, we develop a demography model that represents time trends in the population, which enables us to analyse how the treatment-rehabilitation machinery will respond to an ageing population.
The analyses will uncover social and ethnic inequalities, as well as suboptimal current use of resources, which can be rectified. The predictions of future demands for treatment and rehabilitation will help us to identify bottlenecks before they become a problem.
The Ahus project NOR-SPOT has collected detailed follow-up data from 1908 admissions to the stroke unit.
In addition, we will use national registry data like the Norwegian Patient Registry. Combining the detailed Ahus specific NOR-SPOT data with more coarse data for the entire Norwegian stroke population will enable us to analyse both in depth and width.
Objectives
To acquire novel knowledge about factors that determine the capacity needs in the different components of the stroke treatment patient paths in Norway.
Important question to answer includes: what is the expected number of stroke-mimics (conditions which are initially confounded with strokes)?
This question is related to the case-mix of the inflow to the stroke units: what is the severity and sub-types of strokes, each of which can be expected to display different length-of-stay distributions. What is the expected number of beds, and how does this depend on the size of the hospital?
Financing
The Research Council of Norway: 12.1M NOK (2010–2019; Includes the RCN precursor project “Simulating patient flow and health care costs in Norway” (2010–2014) during which the NOR-SPOT data collection was conducted).