{"entity":{"id":"idea-acc-pathway-capacity-simulation","kind":"idea","name":"Simulate each hospital's cancer pathway as a queue to find and remove the waits","aka":[],"tldr":"Hospitals rarely know which step, the scanner, the biopsy, the pathologist or the clinic slot, is causing the queue. Modelling the pathway like a factory line shows where a small change would remove weeks of waiting.","summary":"Discrete-event simulation and queueing analysis are standard in manufacturing and logistics but rarely applied to cancer diagnostic pathways, where a mismatch between weekly clinic capacity and scanner slots can create long waits that no single department sees. A reusable model fed by routine timestamp data would locate the binding constraint per pathway and quantify the effect of interventions before they are made.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Bottleneck evidence (Fragmented care and guideline gaps): Hanna et al., Mortality due to cancer treatment delay: systematic review and meta-analysis (BMJ 2020)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m4087"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":["ai-computation"],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-care-fragmentation","b-workforce"],"keyPapers":["paper-hanna-bmj"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"hypothesis":"Hospitals using pathway simulation to target interventions will reduce the referral-to-treatment interval for at least two tumour pathways by 25% within a year, at lower cost than untargeted capacity expansion.","rationale":"Operations research routinely finds that a small number of constraints determine throughput and that adding capacity elsewhere achieves nothing; cancer pathways have the same structure.","test":"Apply the model in five hospitals, implement the top recommendation in each, and measure interval change against five matched hospitals.","maturity":"speculative","actor":"engineering","cost":"small","horizonYears":1},"route":"/ideas/idea-acc-pathway-capacity-simulation/","neighbours":{"section":[{"id":"ai-computation","kind":"section","name":"AI & Computation","route":"/fronts/ai-computation/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-care-fragmentation","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Fragmented care and guideline gaps","route":"/bottlenecks/b-care-fragmentation/"},{"id":"b-workforce","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Not enough oncologists, nurses, pathologists, physicists","route":"/bottlenecks/b-workforce/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-hanna-bmj","kind":"paper","name":"Mortality due to cancer treatment delay: systematic review and meta-analysis","route":"/key-papers/paper-hanna-bmj/"}]}}