Optimization of emergency departments by agent-based modeling and simulation

This article presents an agent-based modeling and simulation to design a decision support system for healthcare emergency department to aid in setting up management guidelines to improve it. This ongoing research is being performed by the Research Group in Individual Oriented Modeling at the University Autonoma of Barcelona with close collaboration of the hospital staff team. The objective of the proposed ABM procedure is to optimize the performance of such complex and dynamic healthcare EDs. Exhaustive search optimization is used to find the optimal ED staff configuration, which includes doctors, triage nurses, and admission personnel, i.e., a multi-dimensional problem. An index is proposed to minimize patient length of stay in the ED. The results obtained by using alternatives Monte Carlo and Pipeline schemes are promising and a better understanding of the problem is achieved. The impact of such schemes to reduce the computational cost of exhaustive search is outlined.