Using data to reveal healthcare overcrowding
Together with CBH researchers Sebastiaan Meijer, Adam Darwich and Jayanth Raghothama and staff from Uppsala University Hospital, Luca Marzano, PhD student of the Health informatics and Logistics, has examined how data from hospital emergency departments can be effectively utilised to understand and address the issue of overcrowding in the future.
The study, Diagnosing an overcrowded emergency department from its Electronic Health Records, has now been published in Nature, Scientific Reports.
Luca Marzanos research focuses on developing data-driven approaches to achieve real-world evidence in various healthcare fields, including oncology, clinical trials design, emergency medicine, and psychiatry for children and adolescents.
“This problem is characterised by an increased number of patients seeking care, resulting in long waiting times, treatment delays, and a reduced quality of care. Swedish hospitals are no exception, with reported high workloads, stress among medical staff, and negative patient experiences due to long waiting times,” says Luca Marzano.
This issue is challenging to solve due to the complexity of healthcare operations, the diversity of patient’s clinical characteristics, and the limited number of resources – staff and available beds.
“Our study demonstrates that retrospectively analysing emergency department data, with the involvement of clinical experts throughout the data analysis process, can improve our understanding of the causes of overcrowding and facilitate discussions on future interventions”.
Luca Marzano comes from Italy and studied Physics in his hometown Bari at the Michelangelo Merlin physics department of the University of Aldo Moro. During his master thesis, he worked on developing deep learning and complex graph theory applications in neuroimaging.
“It is during my thesis work that I realised that I want to contribute to the innovation of technology applied in medicine and health care,” he says.
Text: Åsa Karsberg