Modeling a healthcare system as a queueing network: The case of a Belgian hospital

The performance of healthcare systems in terms of patient flow times and utilization of critical resources can be assessed through queueing and simulation models. We model the orthopaedic department of the Middelheim hospital (Antwerpen, Belgium) focusing on the impact of outages (preemptive and nonpreemptive outages) on the effective utilization of resources and on the flow time of patients. Several queueing network solution procedures are developed such as the decomposition and Brownian motion approaches. Simulation is used as a validation tool. We present new approaches to model outages. The model offers a valuable tool to study the trade-off between the capacity structure, sources of variability and patient flow times. Topic areas: health care, performance measurement, capacity management Methodological areas: queueing theory, stochastic processes, case studies