Utilizing a Simulation Approach for Analysis of Patient Flow in the Emergency Department: A Case Study

Simulation has been shown to be one of the most powerful tools in many areas of the health-care system, a system which attracted the attention of researchers due to its intricacy. The main goal of this study is to evaluate the patients' flow in an emergency department (ED). Discrete event simulation (DES) has been used as the core of this research so that it offers various ways to reduce the length of stay (LOS) of patients in different segments of ED by assessing various scenarios. In particular, a new approach for verification of the simulated model will be discussed. This study reports on the results that extracted from a case study on patient record data in one of the EDs located in Tehran province. With the goal of verifying and validating the constructed model, a simulation has been done using Simulink from MATLAB software.