Operations Research and Simulation in Healthcare

Abstract

It is globally accepted to act against global warming through the reduction of carbon dioxide.Carbon footprint is historically defined as the total emissions caused by an individual, event, organization, or product, expressed as carbon dioxide equivalent. Healthcare system consumes large amount of energy in order to provide health services to patients who have to pass a series of treatment processes at each care unit, which each one of them needs different medical equipment in hospital that they cause consuming of electrical power, and the more electrical power consumption, the more greenhouse gases, specifically CO2. The discrete-event simulation has been applied to develop the model of the treatment process and the estimation of carbon dioxide in the treatment process. By the knowledge that the simulation is not an optimization method in itself, the OptQuest optimization method has applied to reduce greenhouse gases and carbon footprint in the patients' flow in the emergency department by considering leveling off the waiting time and length of stay as constraints to leveling up patient's satisfaction. The results comparison of simulation and OptQuest show that the OptQuest is an efficient technique for patient flow optimization.