Process Flows of an Emergency Department: How Process Modeling and Simulation Can Help Improve Efficiency and Quality of Patient Care?

Description

Emergency departments worldwide are the first point of contact for life-saving care. Despite this importance to patient care, emergency departments face a number of shortcomings. For example, emergency departments have been struggling with a lack of ressources, compensation deficits, low level of digitalization and unregulated access to emergency departments for many years. To overcome these challenges despite limited resources, an emergency department must be characterized by good process flows. A well-designed process analysis using a discrete event simulation (DES) can support the implementation of improved workflows and thus sustainably improve the quality of care.. Based on empirical data obtained through observations, expert interviews, process analysis, and time studies, we analyze how process flows in the emergency department can be modeled and evaluated. A stochastic DES model is used to model and simulate the care flow at an emergency department of a primary care provider. . The results of the DES study show that, in particular, digital upgrades to the emergency department and additional human resources can reduce process times in terms of length of stay and waiting times.. It can be concluded that discrete event simulation is a suitable tool to realistically model and simulate complex system such as the emergency department and to extract meaningful improvement potentials. In the future, the potential of information and communication technologies to improve process flows should be more strongly incorporated into DES studies. Because of increasing digitalization and the availability of real-time data, the potential of online DES models should have a greater consideration in the future.

Period	29 Mar 2023
Event title	RSU Research week 2023: Society. Health. Welfare
Event type	Conference
Conference number	9
Organiser	Rīga Stradiņš University
Location	Riga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International