Patients Flow Simulation through Configurable Modelling of Pathways: Application to a Shared Outpatient Department

The simulation of patients flows in a hospital makes it possible to evaluate improvement solutions in an objective way before implementing them. However, conducting a simulation study presents many difficulties due to the multitude of pathways followed by patients and the lack of a common language between the hospital staff and experts in simulation. The purpose of this article is to introduce the use of a pathways configurator coupled with a discrete event simulation tool. The configurator, which can be used by hospital staff not expert in simulation, allows to describe all the pathways on the basis of medical care or administrative activities and waitings. The data of the configurator are then used as input data of a customizable model, which allows to carry out simulations without it being necessary to intervene on the model itself. Simulation and pathways validation is then performed using a process mining tool.