ANALYSIS OF PATIENT FLOW USING HYBRID MODELING APPROACH

Abstract

The most important agenda of health care organizations is to provide quality service with specific number of resources and maintain an efficient patient flow. Maximizing and optimizing the throughput of patient flow for quality care is most important objective of healthcare systems. It impacts the patient safety, quality of services and finance of healthcare institutions. Healthcare institutions deals with patient arrival and flow of patients to several departments for physician’s assessment, lab tests etc. For decades’ healthcare institutions are facing crowded emergency departments due to lack of focus on healthcare administration. Delayed activities can affect the patient care like staff shortage, delayed surgeries, long waiting queues and diverted ambulances. To address these challenges this research analyzes the patient flow for better optimization and maximizing the patient flow throughput. In our research model rate of patient’s arrival changes over time. Hybrid modeling is suitable modeling paradigm when agents have dynamically associated with other agents and are geographically spread. For the proof of concept hybrid model approach which combines Agent based modeling and Discrete Event modeling is used.