Discrete event systems models and methods for different problems in healthcare management

The rapidly growing of the world´s population makes efficient Healthcare System (HS) management more and more important to all stakeholders, from patients and healthcare providers, to insurance companies and governments. The use of advanced information and networking technologies to advance health care management has long been recognized as the most effective way. Hence, healthcare organizations are often compared with manufacturing systems, and techniques and models from production systems are adapted to solve healthcare management problems. This paper presents a review about the relevant approaches in the related literature to model and simulate HSs with particular focus on discrete event system approaches. In particular, some works are recalled with more detail to show the integrated use of different formalisms in order to model and manage conventional HSs (e.g., hospital departments) as well as novel healthcare paradigms, like health at home and electronic health.