(No audio recording available for this talk)

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 9,2006 -- 11am-12 pm
PLACE: HSB106.The Health Sciences Building 155 College Avenue.

David Sinreich,William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
The Emergency Department Simulation Tool - A Step towards a Virtual Hospital Model Using the Generic Process Modeling Approach

Developing a detailed simulation model of a system is always a tedious, time consuming highly expensive task. This is especially true when it comes to healthcare settings which are usually large, complex and highly dynamic systems. The acceptance of simulation as a viable modeling tool by healthcare policy makers relays on the simulation tool being general, simple, and intuitive which allows for efficient cost effective modeling.
The generic process modeling approach was developed in order to maintain a reasonable level of abstraction, which is an essential requirement to form a general modeling tool, while at the same time also promote simplicity. In this approach, a generic process is developed to serve as the simulation model's basic building block. The generic process contrary to a generic activity represents a class of systems each of which are governed by some derivative of this process. Using this modeling approach means that developing a new model requires the customization of an existing generic process to fit the required characteristics of the new system rather than developing a new model from scratch.
The generic process modeling approach was used to develop an Emergency Department dedicated simulation tool that describes the clinical pathways patients go through when visiting the Emergency Department. The study established that the generic process is dependent on the patient type and independent of the specific hospital the patients are treated at. The generic process was constructed based on comprehensive field observations in several large and small general hospitals. The use of this Emergency Department simulation tool is simple and efficient and only requires the insertion of several relevant parameters to model different Emergency Departments.
This approach can also be used to model other segments of the hospital such as the imaging center that serves the Emergency Department and the other hospital wards, the main admission wards and the operating room theater. Integrating these segments together using distributed simulation has the potential to create a complete virtual model of a hospital.

---

David Sinreich (Ph.D.) is a faculty member at the Industrial Engineering and Management faculty at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. David received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in 1993. David's research interests include system's process design and analysis, healthcare engineering, material handling and simulation. David is an area editor for IIE Transaction and on the editorial board of IJPR and OR spectrum. He is a senior member of IIE and a member of IFPR and published papers in journals such as Annals of OR, IIE Transactions, IJFMS, IJPR, JMS, JHOM, and others. His e-mail address is sinreich@ie.technion.ac.il and his Web address is <http://ie.technion.ac.il/sinreich.phtml>.