Real-Time Simulation of Patient Care Processes in Healthcare

The increasing waiting times to access healthcare services are a major concern for patients in hospitals. Due to the unpredictability of health issues, hospitals and clinical services are provided to patients even without prescheduled medical appointments. Unexpected and random patient arrivals can result in high waiting times. Waiting occurs mostly because of insufficient resources available compared to demanding service delivery requirements at a given time. Thus, appropriate management of resource scheduling over time can help reduce patient wait times.;This research presents real-time simulation capabilities for short-term operational decision making of patient care processes in hospitals and the possible ways to run alternative scenarios and evaluate their results to come up with the most effective solution considering various factors. This thesis also provides tool support based on a leading simulation environment, namely Arena. The tool-supported methodology is evaluated through a realistic cardiac care process in an Ontario community hospital, with encouraging results.;So far, simulation has mostly been used as a support for strategic decision making in healthcare environments. We are proposing a complementary approach, namely, real-time simulation, to support operational decision making rather than long-term strategic decision making. Real-time simulation is a technique used to get a timely prediction of the system status in a near future (e.g., a few hours). Hospitals can benefit from the capabilities of real-time simulations by predicting upcoming bottleneck occurrences in patient care processes and make effective decisions in the present time to avoid undesirable outcomes in the near future.