A Review Of Hybrid Simulation In Healthcare

Hybrid Simulation (HS) has been applied to healthcare systems, but there is still limited literature and an opportunity to develop research. This review explores applications of HS in healthcare, to outline research gaps and foster new research in HS to solve complex real healthcare problems. The twelve application papers found through a systematic literature search covered nearly all hybrid combinations. Discrete Event (DES) and System Dynamics (SD) were found to be the most popular combination, and AnyLogic, the most used HS tool. We found that none of the papers we reviewed used the SD-ABS approach, which raises questions about the need and challenges associated with certain combinations. HS in healthcare applications, for the most part, are published in conference proceedings. We discuss opportunities for research and, in particular, the potential for HS application in problems related to communicable disease and healthcare services planning

Using simulation to examine appointment overbooking schemes for a medical imaging center

© 2015 IEEE. In this paper, we present an appointment scheduling problem faced by a medical imaging center in a major hospital in Macau. We developed an empirically calibrated simulation model to represent the appointment and medical diagnosis procedure as a multi-server queuing network with multiple patient classes. Four appointment overbooking schemes are proposed to compensate for patient no-shows and unpunctuality. The focus of this study is to integrate overbooking schemes with existing appointment rules to improve the operational efficiency of the center. Simulation results show that our proposed overbooking schemes significantly enhance the performance of the center. Compared with the current practice, the best performing overbooking scheme reduces the overtime by 58.32% and the idle time by 23.65%, increases the number of patients served by 15.9%, while still ensuring that patient waiting times remain acceptable.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex