Simulation Optimization for Healthcare Emergency Departments

AbstractThis article presents an Agent-Based modeling (ABM) simulation to design a decision support system (DSS) for Healthcare Emergency Department (ED). This DSS aims to aid EDs heads in setting up management guidelines to improve the operation of EDs. This ongoing research is being performed by the Research Group in Individual Oriented Modeling (IoM) at the University Autonoma of Barcelona (UAB) with close collaboration of Hospital ED Staff Team. The objective of the proposed ABM procedure is to optimize the performance of such complex and dynamic Healthcare EDs, because worldwide most of them are overcrowded, and unable to provide ad hoc care, quality and service. Exhaustive search (ES) optimization is used to find out the optimal ED staff configuration, which includes doctors, triage nurses, and admission personnel, i.e., a multidimensional problem. An index is proposed to minimize patient length of stay in the ED. The results obtained by using an alternative pipeline scheme to ES are promising and a better understanding of the problem is achieved. The impact of the pipeline scheme to reduce the computational cost of exhaustive search is outlined