Abstract
Patients’ overcrowding in Emergency Department (ED) is a major problem in medical care worldwide, predominantly due to time and resource constraints. Simulation modeling is an economical approach to solve complex healthcare problems. We employed Discrete Event System Specification-JAVA (DEVS-JAVA) based model to simulate and test changes in emergency service conditions with an overall goal to improve ED patient flow. Initially, we developed a system based on ED data from South Carolina hospitals. Later, we ran simulations on four different case scenarios. 1. Optimum number (no.) of doctors and patients needed to reduce average (avg) time of assignment (avg discharge time = 33 min). 2. Optimum no. of patients to reduce avg discharge time (avg wait time = 150 min). 3. Optimum no. of patients to reduce avg directing time to critical care (avg wait time = 58 min). 4. Optimum no. of patients to reduce avg directing time to another hospital (avg wait time = 93 min). Upon execution of above 4 simulations, 4 patients got discharged utilizing 3 doctors; 5 patients could be discharged from ED to home; 2 patients could be transferred from ED to critical care; 3 patients could be transferred from ED to another hospital. Our results suggest that the generated DEVS-JAVA simulation method seems extremely effective to solve time-dependent healthcare problems.
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Acknowledgments
1. Support from the Georgia State University Information Technology Department (GSU IT) for server space is gratefully acknowledged.
2. Support from the Artificial Intelligence and Simulation Research Group, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Arizona for providing DEVS-JAVA architecture is gratefully acknowledged.
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Appendix - Selected Pseudo Code Segments
Appendix - Selected Pseudo Code Segments
This section contains selected pseudo code segments that are related to the simulation of case 1 discussed in this article. This could help the readers to reproduce and improve our simulation results.
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Pawar, S., Stanam, A. (2019). Developing a DEVS-JAVA Model to Simulate and Pre-test Changes to Emergency Care Delivery in a Safe and Efficient Manner. In: Rojas, I., Valenzuela, O., Rojas, F., Ortuño, F. (eds) Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering. IWBBIO 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11466. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17935-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17935-9_1
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