Data modelling and validation of an emergency department simulation model — A Lean Healthcare Approach

Abstract

An increasing demand for the public emergency systems has been noticed in the recent past. Since public hospitals capacity, in terms of resources, doesn’t followed such increase proportionally, operational problems started to emerge. To pursue better hospital operations management, lean philosophy has been adopted since the its successful cases in the industry. For this purpose, a statistical analysis was made in the hospital database in order to obtain key performance indicators (KPI), such as Takt Time as well as the arrival patterns per priority. Such statistical data and KPIs were posteriorly used to validate a discrete simulation model that represents the emergency system of a public hospital in Portugal. Therefore, multiple processes were modeled, like the admission, triage and the arrival of patients to the treatment rooms. Finally, it is presented the validation procedure for the simulation model. After testing it was possible to prove that the simulation model is valid, which means that is capable of representing the real system, achieving realistic results.