Background: Operating room (OR) is one of the main hospital parts and management of time and cost are very important in this essential unit. Also, due to the close relationship with other departments, improving its service quality and performance, significantly increases the efficiency of hospital. OR is a complex system in which each lack of coordination effects on all hospita...

Discrete-event simulation of hospitals typically specifies flow by means of a process graph through which patients are routed. While this is generally fine for models in which processes are clearly defined, e.g. smaller units such as emergency departments, it falls short of capturing the fact that a patient can in principle go from one unit to any other unit if medical procedure requires it. Th...

Sports medicine (SM) is a clinical subspecialty concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of injuries and illnesses sustained both in and out of the athletic arena. Historically, orthopedic surgeons provided the bulk of care for the athlete. Since the majority of issues with athletes are nonoperative musculoskeletal injuries, traumatic brain injuries, or general medical conditions, primary car...

The understanding of human central nervous system (CNS) depends on knowledge of its wiring. However, there are still gaps in our understanding of its wiring due to technical difficulties. While some information is coming out from human experiments, medical research is lacking of simulation models to put current findings together to obtain the global picture and to predict hypotheses to lead fut...

Abstract Aims The transfer of responsibility for patient care across the Emergency Department (ED)/ inpatient interface has always been recognised as a challenging process. Current research focuses on qualitative data and is based occasionally anecdotal information. aim this study was to identify barriers efficient flow with specific focus type quality referrals logistics involved. Methods Quan...

Legislation introduced in January 2001 has meant that progestogen only contraception is now available without prescription for women aged 16 years and over. Patient records of two emergency departments in the South East Thames region between 2000 and 2001 were reviewed and it was found that there was a 52% reduction in the number of women attending these emergency departments with requests for ...

BACKGROUND Patient safety and emergency department (ED) functionality are compromised when inefficient coordination between hospital departments impedes ED patients' access to inpatient cardiac care. The objective of this study was to determine how bed demand from competing cardiology admission sources affects ED patients' access to inpatient cardiac care. METHODS A stochastic discrete event ...

Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) is a new approach to modeling systems comprised of autonomous, interacting agents. ABMS promises to have far-reaching effects on the way that businesses use computers to support decision-making and researchers use electronic laboratories to support their research. Some have gone so far as to contend that ABMS is a third way of doing science besides ded...

Agent-based models (ABMs) are ubiquitous in research and industry. Currently, simulating ABMs involves at least some imperative (step-by-step) computer instructions. An alternative approach is declarative programming, in which a set of requirements is described at a high level of abstraction. Here we describe a fully declarative approach to the automated construction of simulations for ABMs. In...

OBJECTIVE To determine the correlation between individual patient experience dimensions and overall patient satisfaction using text-based analysis of subjective comments of patients treated in emergency departments. METHODS Open-ended comments from 331 patients who visited the emergency departments of 4 hospitals were used for coding different dimensions of patient experience. Regression coef...