A Survey of Validation in Health Care Simulation Studies

The importance of proper verification and validation (V&V) of simulation models and experiments is well accepted in the modeling and simulation community. There is currently a push to improve the scientific aspects of modeling and simulation, including validation. To determine the amount of validation performed in practice, we analyze 110 health care simulation papers from the last eight years of the Winter Simulation Conference for the level of verification and validation reported and the types of validation techniques applied. Our results show that validation is not discussed sufficiently in most published papers. Although many authors are performing some level of validation on their simulation, close to a fourth of the papers do not mention V&V, while more than half do not provide detail of the type and amount of V&V performed.