A Web-based Visual Simulator for Hospital Management Using Discrete Event Simulation

Access, demand and resource management issues in hospitals continue to plague the area of hospital management. Access is the capacity to provide patients with health care in a timely fashion, demand is a community’s need for health care satisfied by available health services and resource management is the use of various resources available to hospitals for managing them. Problems in these three areas lead to long waits in emergency, prolonged periods for patients on procedural waiting lists and cancellation of surgical operations. To support hospital managers in effective management of a hospital, managers require software that presents them with necessary information about resources, such as beds available for patients in emergency. This study presents a new Web-based visual solution to the abovementioned problems using discrete event simulation. This system builds on our previous work where simulations are generated using a Web site, but the Web site generates an enormous quantity of data as output. This output needs to be processed in a very short amount of time (given managers need for quick access to information) and displayed in visual manner for easy use and interpretation by managers. Our software solution is absolutely novel as our earlier work on which the new solution is based was also novel as a solution for hospital managers.