Transient Modeling in Simulation of Hospital Operations for Emergency Response

Abstract

Rapid estimates of hospital capacity after an event that may cause a disaster can assist disaster-relief efforts. Due to the dynamics of hospitals, following such an event, it is necessary to accurately model the behavior of the system. A transient modeling approach using simulation and exponential functions is presented, along with its applications in an earthquake situation. The parameters of the exponential model are regressed using outputs from designed simulation experiments. The developed model is capable of representing transient, patient waiting times during a disaster. Most importantly, the modeling approach allows real-time capacity estimation of hospitals of various sizes and capabilities. Further, this research is an analysis of the effects of priority-based routing of patients within the hospital and the effects on patient waiting times determined using various patient mixes. The model guides the patients based on the severity of injuries and queues the patients requiring critical care depending on their remaining survivability time. The model also accounts the impact of prehospital transport time on patient waiting time.

Modeling the effects of port disasters

“…To capture the steady-state operational behavior of ports from the simulation runs, we used the following general parametric form of non-linear regression, which has been shown to effectively represent the relationship between processing time and capacity factors in discrete event simulation modeling (Paul et al, 2006):…”

Development of a Simulation Environment to Study Emergency Department Information Technology

“…Such scenarios may be valuable in assessing IT system performance under conditions of disaster emergencies. 45 It is also possible that the simulator could support ED training sessions. Scenarios could be developed which include incidents of interest (e.g., mass casualties) or situations which could lead to errors (e.g., patients with similar names), and used within a more immersive simulated ED setting for training.…”

Recommendations for Modeling Disaster Responses in Public Health and Medicine: A Position Paper of the Society for Medical Decision Making

“…12 Responses to natural disasters: Despite the frequency and potentially catastrophic health consequences of natural disasters (e.g., in 2007, 406 natural disasters killed 17,000 people and affected another 201 million people 13 ; and in 2004, the Boxing Day tsunami killed more than 200,000 people 14 ), remarkably few published models have focused on the public health and medical responses to such events. Several of the included models focused on earthquakes, 15,16 including one that is geographically customizable and allows the user to estimate the impact of health facility damage, rescue time, and out-of-region transportation on overall mortality. 15 One study of evacuation timing in response to the threat of a hurricane presented receiver operating characteristic curves for four coastal U.S. cities comparing the probability of correct landfall prediction against the probability of a false alarm.…”