Agent-Based Simulation to Optimize Healthcare Emergency Departments

Modeling and simulation have been shown to be useful tools in many areas of the Healthcare operational management, field in which there is probably no area more dynamic and complex than hospital emergency departments (ED). This paper presents an ongoing research, an Agent-Based modeling and simulation to design a decision support system (DSS) for the operation of Healthcare Emergency Departments (ED). This DSS aims to aid EDs managers in setting up strategies and management guidelines to optimize the operation of EDs. This ongoing research is being performed by the Research Group on Individual Oriented Modeling (IoM) of CAOS in the University Autonoma of Barcelona (UAB) in close collaboration with Hospital ED Staff. The simulation main objective is to optimize the performance of such complex and dynamic Healthcare ED. Optimization is performed to find the optimal ED staff configuration, which consists of doctors, triage nurses, and admission personnel, i.e. a multidimensional problem. Two different indexes, to minimize patient waiting time, and to maximize patient throughput, were proposed and tested and their results obtained appying an exhaustive search technique, yield promising results and better understanding of the problem. Keywords— Optimization, healthcare operational management, emergency department, agent-based simulation, decision support systems.