Toward simulation-based real-time decision-support systems for emergency departments

Emergency Departments (EDs) require advanced support systems for monitoring and controlling their processes: clinical, operational, and financial. A prerequisite for such a system is comprehensive operational information (e.g. queueing times, busy resources,...), reliably portraying and predicting ED status as it evolves in time. To this end, simulation comes to the rescue, through a two-step procedure that is hereby proposed for supporting real-time ED control. In the first step, an ED manager infers the ED's current state, based on historical data and simulation: data is fed into the simulator (e.g. via location-tracking systems, such as RFID tags), and the simulator then completes unobservable state-components. In the second step, and based on the inferred present state, simulation supports control by predicting future ED scenarios. To this end, we estimate time-varying resource requirements via a novel simulation-based technique that utilizes the notion of offered-load. ©2009 IEEE.