The Effect of Risks on Discrete Event Simulation in Healthcare Systems

• Published in: Operations Research and Simulation in Healthcare pp. 209 - 225
• Main Authors: Poursoltan, Milad, Masmoudi, Malek, Traore, Mamadou Kaba
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2021; Springer International Publishing
• ISBN: 3030452220; 9783030452223
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-45223-0_10

A wide variety of projects are performed in healthcare in order to improve managerial decisions for efficient allocation of material, staff, and financial resources. However, traditional approaches do not take into account the inevitable process variability, uncertainty, scale, and interconnections that are critical for making efficient managerial decisions in real healthcare systems. Thus, engineers are increasingly involved in using computer simulation which is able to capture all these factors into efficient managerial decision-making. But, when compared to other applications, the simulation project in healthcare is more likely to fail and has a poor success rate. This chapter draws on the discrete event simulation (DES) project in healthcare and discusses the agenda of DES projects in healthcare focusing on (1) a characterization of DES project and simulation process, (2) risks on DES project in healthcare, and (3) applicable risk analysis methods. This chapter contains a real case study—an emergency department—which seems to be the most popular area of DES projects in healthcare.