Simulation based analysis of patient arrival to health care systems and evaluation of an operations improvement scheme

Peter Williams (), Guangfu Tai () and Yiming Lei ()

Annals of Operations Research, 2010, vol. 178, issue 1, 263-279

Abstract: Various demands of different patients over both medical resource and time domains in health care systems raise requests of strategies for balanced system capacity from an operations perspective. In this paper, a quantitative modeling technique with both patient arrival and associated treatment process integrated are used to characterize health care system performance and evaluate system efficiency. The patient arrival process is described as a dynamic random Poisson process and patient treatments are characterized as consumption processes of various health care resources over time with a view of the “product line” used. The waiting time of patients and usage of health care resources are proposed as system performance measures based on their means, variances, and confidence intervals. A simulation considering patients with several various diseases is given to find a mechanism of conflicting factors in decisions of balanced system capacity, and an operation scheme of “evenly balanced load for bottlenecks” is obtained based on analysis of simulation outputs. Simul8 provides the software environment for the simulation. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Keywords: Health care systems; Product line; Performance measures; Operations improvement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-009-0580-x

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