Showing 9 results for Simulation
Dr. Khodakaram Salimifard, Leyla Keshtkar, Mohammadsadegh Moradi,
Volume 13, Issue 3 (12-2014)
Abstract
Background: Emergency department performance can be evaluated in quantitative and qualitative criteria. Some quantitative criteria are considered such as length of stay, patient waiting time, the percentage of patients that treat in a specific time and etc. In this paper the performance of emergency department was evaluated in terms of these criteria. Then four scenarios by using simulations was proposed.
Materials & Methods: patient flow was modeled by discrete event simulation (DES) and the simulation was done by Arena software. Data was gathered randomly and patient waiting time, length of stay and the percentage of patients by noticing 6-hour boarding limit for EDs were performance criteria.
Result: The result show 70% of patients were hospitalized in ED over 6 hours and it is an important bottleneck. The fourth scenario is that best of the scenarios, that improve in waiting times for hospital admission (85%), total waiting time before hospitalization (63%) and the percentage of the beds utilization (15%).
Conclusion: the findings of this paper show that the fourth scenario has greatest improve in the process. In this scenario, to reduce waiting times for patients admitted to the emergency department as well as to reduce the high percentage of occupied beds, 3 beds and 1 nurse were added.
Master Science Mohsen Afsahi, Dr. Mohammad Mehdi Sepehri, Master Ehsan Ameri,
Volume 14, Issue 1 (6-2015)
Abstract
Background: Deciding on the number of hospital beds is one of the most serious challenges managers face. More hospital beds result in higher running cost although less hospital beds might cause disorder in patients flow. Minimizing total cost besides maximizing the patients flow in a hospital network, considering the practical limitations is the main objective of this survey.
Materials & Methods: This study had main steps to investigate following: identifying current limitations of changing capacity of each ward, by conducting interview with hospital managers and other personnel of Modares hospital, analyzing cardiac patient flow analysis, simulating current flow, determining practical scenarios and choosing the best among them by mathematical modeling could minimize total cost and maximize patient flow.
Results: 31 practical scenarios have been determined and analyzed by surveying limitations among all existing scenarios. Finally, eight best scenarios had been selected. Results showed that decreasing the number of beds in CCU and increasing the number of beds in Post-CCU can improve patients flow, considering cost limitations.
Conclusion: A recommended approach in this study can be a general guide for capacity planning with taking practical limitations into consideration. This survey could be useful for the managers who are against the benefits of post CCU by comparing the patient flow with and without this ward.
Zahra Jalilibal, Mahyar Kianpour, Fariborz Jolai,
Volume 14, Issue 4 (1-2016)
Abstract
Background: Health care systems especially hospitals often encounter several risks which has weaken efficiency and hospitals performance entirely. Resilience engineering (RE) enables to remain high risk systems stable faced to sudden changes or minimizes negative effects of changes.
Materials and Methods: This study considered a new hybrid framework concept regarding the non-value added waiting time and resilience engineering indices as efficiency indices to evaluate private and public hospitals performance. With the intention of evaluating the hospitals performance, a hybrid framework including simulation and MADM methods utilized. Output-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach used as MADM method.
Results: The results revealed that RE factors play a significant role in hospitals performance's promotion; also the private hospitals had better performance compared to the public ones.
Conclusions: Study results indicated that teamwork efficiency index compare to other efficiency indices had more effect on hospitals performance. Health system managers should be considered improved performance and efficiency policies and focus more on other RE indices parallel team work index.
Mahdieh Tavakoli, Mohssen Ghanavatinejad, Fatemeh Jalalifar, Dr Elham Yavari,
Volume 17, Issue 4 (2-2019)
Abstract
Background: The admission unit is the main entrance of the hospital and the first patient communication with the hospital is through this unit. The waiting time of patients, which is one of the main consequent of this unit, is not only one of the important factors affecting the satisfaction of the patients, but also is one of indicators of the quality of service of the hospital. This study aimed to provide scenarios at reducing patients’ waiting times.
Materials and Methods: This research in terms of methods and goals was a descriptive and an applied one, respectively. This study performed on 110 patients who had been admitted to the Mohb-e-Mehr hospital during 70 days and were uniformly trained on all days of the week. Information was also obtained using observation and data recording in prepared forms. The simulation model was designed and implemented with the Arena 14 software.
Results: Based on research findings, the para-clinical unit and the waiting room for hospitalization were two main bottlenecks in the studied system. In order to solve the problem, for each of the above units, a scenario designed and simulated. The implementation of these tests revealed that the proposed scenarios in comparison with the existing conditions had better results in reducing the waiting time and also increasing the number of admitted patients.
Conclusion: Improvement of the therapeutic processes will occur through the recognition of the hospital services system and analysis of the bottlenecks and its weakness points. According to the results, an increase in the number of para-clinical unit staff and hospital beds improves the hospital admission function. The implementation of mentioned scenarios reduces waiting time for patients by about 78% and reduces the waiting time for emptying the bed by about 50%.
Ali Alizadeh Zoeram, Dr Alireza Pooya, Dr Zahra Naji Azimi, Dr Ali Vafaee Najar,
Volume 18, Issue 1 (5-2019)
Abstract
Background: In service organizations such as hospitals, human resources (HR) play a key role in the quality of service delivery. Lack of a systemic attitude in terms of system dynamics, HR planning have been somewhat distant from reality. In order to solve such a problem, this study aimed to modeling the dynamics of human resources capacity management system in healthcare services.
Materials and Methods: This case study is one of the cases at a clinic of Khatam -al-Anbia Eye Hospital of Mashhad which was used to simulate the system dynamics approach. In the implementation process, after modeling and formulating in Vensim software, the model was validated and appropriate policies were identified based on simulation results.
Results: The simulation results revealed a gap existence between service capacity and desired capacity led to a work pressure. Consequently, time per service relative to the standard time per service (0.333 hours equivalent to 20 minutes) as the core of service quality has been reduced (cutting corners of time). To counteract such a situation, appropriate policies were identified during the time in a dynamic manner using sensitivity analysis based on changing patient acceptance rates and human resource changes.
Conclusion: The proposed model provides the status for hospital managers which allows them to manage appropriate human resources in the same conditions with a viewpoint of causal relationships with respect to system dynamics.
Nader Markazi Moghadam, Sanaz Zargar, Zaniar Ghaderi, Ehsan Tofighi,
Volume 19, Issue 1 (4-2020)
Abstract
Background: Hospitals play a key role in ensuring community health. Among the hospital departments, the surgery room accounts for a significant portion of the cost and revenue of the hospital. Surgery timing is important to increase the efficiency of operating rooms. The purpose of this study was to optimize surgical hall scheduling based on discrete event simulation model.
Materials & Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed in the summer of 2018 in the operation room of one of the hospitals in Tehran. As people entered the operation room, their information about the cause and condition that caused the surgery, the type of surgery (elective or emergency) the time of being in the operation was recorded by details. Data analysis was performed SPSS software and simulation of therapeutic system was performed Arena software.
Results: By analyzing the input data of 625 patients during three months, more than 60% of patients were men and less than 40% were women. The first entry into the surgery room for the selected patients was at 7:10 am and the last was at 5:00 pm. Of the eight scenarios presented, two arrival rate correction scenarios (noon arrival distribution) and a combined scenario (noon queue correction and patient adding) resulted in the greatest reduction in waiting time.
Conclusion: The results of this study showed that changing the distribution of patients 'arrival to hours with less input time can decrease patients' waiting time and increase the efficiency of surgery room.
Bahare Rahmani Manshadi, Bakhtiar Ostadi, Amirhosein Jalali,
Volume 20, Issue 2 (9-2021)
Abstract
Background: The waiting list is a list of selected patients in the surgical queue. If demand exceeds capacity, the waiting list grows rapidly, which may lead to unacceptable waiting for patients, especially those in need of acute medical care. Patients waiting for heart surgery are placed on the waiting list for surgery, and sometimes the waiting time is longer than patients expect. Reducing the waiting time for medical services, including heart surgery, is one of the challenges of the health system. In this regard, the present study was performed by identifying an effective solution to reduce the queue length of patients undergoing cardiac surgery.
Materials and Methods: In this article, the process of scheduling open heart surgery at Shahid Rajaei Hospital was reviewed and improved with a discrete event simulation approach in Arena simulation software. After designing the process, the existing bottlenecks leading to the long waiting time of the patients were identified. The waiting time and the number of patients visited were determined as the objective function and the patient flow was improved by presenting improvement scenarios and selecting the best scenario.
Results: Simulation results on 66 selected patients in 7 months from October 2020 to May 27, 2021 show that Scenario number 10 has the most improvement in performance criteria but is not applicable in practice. Therefore, due to system limitations, Scenario 2 was selected as the best scenario. Implementing Scenario 2 could reduce the waiting time by 40 percent and increase the number of patients visited by 21 percent.
Conclusion: Patient prioritization methods allow patients with higher needs to receive more services than those with lower urgent needs, although they also have longer waiting times for patients with lower urgent needs.
Hamid Mohammadi, Shahram Tofighi, Mostafa Rajabi, Hamidreza Izadbakhsh, Bahar Hafezi,
Volume 21, Issue 1 (5-2022)
Abstract
Background: The use of simulation models can help elucidate the intuitive behavior of complex health care problems. Today, the complexity of problems goes far beyond our capacity to solve them manually. System simulation is considered as a wise option by approaching structural problems and understanding the complex interactions within the problems and their changes. The purpose of this study is to review the most advanced applications of system dynamics in healthcare.
Materials and methods: This study is a systematic selection of articles that explored the applications of system dynamics in health care in 11 databases between 1999 and 2019. The focus of this research was on articles with the keywords including system dynamics in health care, dynamic health care analysis, continuous health care simulation or dynamic health care simulation.
Results: 79 articles related to system dynamics applications in healthcare were identified in databases. Eighty-five percent of the articles focused on finance, politics, government, regulation, public health, and health care planning. Among the articles, the patient's treatment path, obesity and demand for healthcare workforce were examined.
Conclusion: The tendency to use continuous simulation in healthcare has increased. However, the power of hybrid simulation can take advantage of the inherent strength of the system dynamics overview perspective, and in a hybrid model it can utilize a holistic perspective for managing health care systems. Potential areas with the application of systems dynamics in future research include planning and policy-making in public health decision-making, purchasing quality management, care and risk.
Hasan Fatahi, Seyyed Mohammad Waziri, Mahyar Souri, Mohammad Hossein Askarian,
Volume 22, Issue 2 (9-2023)
Abstract
Background and purpose: The emergency department of a hospital is akin to its heart, where smooth operations can save many lives. This research aims to reduce patient waiting time in the emergency department using simulation techniques.
Methods: This descriptive-analytical study was conducted cross-sectionally in 2019 at the Qaim Hospital in Mashhad. The study focused on accurately modeling the patient flow process in the emergency department using simulation techniques and Arena software. Key performance indicators such as patient waiting time, number of discharged patients (system output), length of stay, resource efficiency, and improvements in the emergency department were evaluated.
Results: The simulation model's results indicated that the laboratory, specialist doctor examination, and pharmacy departments had the longest waiting times in this department, respectively.
Conclusion: To reduce patient waiting times and improve conditions, the most effective and cost-efficient solution is to add a laboratory technician to the laboratory department during the [15-23] shift at Qaim Hospital in Mashhad, which is projected to decrease patient waiting times by 66 minutes.
