Investigating and Analysis of Hospital Performance Using Discrete Event Simulation

The quality of providing health care services is one of the factors used to compare countries’ development, and hospitals account for a major share of this. In this study, the discrete event simulation is employed to measure the performance of a health care center in terms of various Key Performance Indicators (i.e., the number of patients admitted, time spending in the system, waiting time and resource utilization) and to improve capacity management. For this purpose, different parts of a hospital, from the entry of the patients to the exit door including Specialized Clinics, General Clinic, Emergency Department, Cashier Desk, and Pharmacy are considered from a comprehensive perspective. Arena Simulation software is applied as the platform for building the simulation model. Real hospital data is used to validate the proposed model. The collected real data are analyzed using Input analyzer tool available in Arena to fed up the simulation model with the required data, information, and structural and parametric assumptions of the system as inputs. In order to improve hospital performance in its key performance indicators, eight scenarios are proposed in comparison with the current situation. After running the scenarios, the results and impact of the proposed scenarios are discussed and compared with each other.