A study of complications affecting surgery performance: an ISM-based roadmap to patient flow

The aim of this study is to highlight the value of the success rate performance of a surgery while planning patient flow within a supply chain of a health care organization/hospital.

The paper has considered one of the common surgeries, cataract, and the complications that subsequently result from this surgery. The study employs interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach to draw a roadmap to study various complications causing cataract that subsequently help in planning and coordination of patient flow.

The study finds that there is a hierarchy of causes and certain complications, the persistence of which gives a higher success rate performance in cataract surgery as compared to others.

The paper provides leverage to the decision maker while organizing the patient flow depending upon the information of hierarchy of complication of a disease, and accordingly ensures the availability of resources to the patient.

The study is of value in identifying the degree of complications from cataract surgery. Given the degree of complication, the patient logistics can be planned myopically in a health care organization which largely depends upon the degree of success rate. The paper attempts to suggest that the hierarchy obtained through ISM can be implemented in the modules of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) set up.