topic Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department? in FlexSim Forum

Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

shaghayegh — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 16:50:34 GMT

[ FlexSim 22.2.0 ]

Hello,

I am modeling an emergency department and want to direct patients to different locations based on the ESI triage model, which has level 1 to level 5. In my emergency department, there is 1 patient for level 1, 32 patients for level 2, 25 patients for level 3, 3 patients for level 4 and 2 patients for level 5. For example: after triage, out of these 32 level 2 patients, 23 patients go to the acute area and 9 patients go to the resuscitation area. How to simulate this ESI triage in FlexSim Healthcare? Should a separate source be defined for each triage level or can a common source be used for all triage levels? In general, How to simulate the number and flow of the patient for these 5 levels of triage?

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

julie_weller — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 17:02:51 GMT

Hi @shaghayegh! You can do it either way, in the arrivals tab you can schedule the patients and when you do that you can add labels to each patient (for your model maybe for each level or for acute vs resuscitation). Then in the main process flow you can use a decide and their labels to decide where each patient needs to go to. You could also look at other healthcare example models on this website for ideas or if you try to implement it and comment back I can help you work through any remaining issues!

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

shaghayegh — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 17:26:41 GMT

Thank you @Julie Weller for your explanation, I was a bit confused. Please, if it is possible for you, explain it to me in the form of a gif or a picture. For example, explain here in the form of a picture or let's communicate on Google Meet.

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

julie_weller — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 17:31:55 GMT

If you give me an hour or two I can upload a sample model and walk you through it a little!

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

shaghayegh — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 17:35:08 GMT

Thank you so much @Julie Weller

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

julie_weller — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 17:45:02 GMT

In the meantime, it might be helpful to work through the healthcare tutorials!

https://docs.flexsim.com/en/23.1/Tutorials/FlexSimHC/OverviewFlexSimHC/OverviewFlexSimHC.html

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

julie_weller — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 18:14:02 GMT

Okay so here is a pretty complex model and I want to draw your attention to some things! If you don't a basic understanding of the HC environment, the tutorial I posted above will walk you through the basics of it and this model is based on that tutorial. Here's the model:

Phase_9.fsm

The first thing I want to show you is the arrivals tab:

When you create a Patient Flow it will automatically create these blocks (1 for each patient flow and is connected). You can edit the sources in the arrivals tab to create patients when you want, for example you could schedule when you want each of your specific number of patients to arrive (shown on the left) which looks like this:

You could say you want your 32, level 2 patients to all come at 8am or if you specify a time interval, then at the bottom where it says arrival spacing you could choose a different distribution like evenly space or randomly spaced. Additionally on the top of this bar you can choose a label, so you could specify that they are Level 2 and how many are acute or resuscitation. Something like this for example might suit your needs:

Then in the model you can use decide activities to choose where and what you need the patients to do like this block does:

However if you set the labels on the patients you can only get them off the patients using syntax like patient.Level

So that is one way you could do it.

Another option is you could create individual patient flows for each level of care (just create 5-6) patients flows and then you can decide what they are doing individually. The downside to that is that if they do a lot of the same things (wait in a line, go to the doctor, there will be a lot of duplications). Does that help answer your question? I'm more than happy to explain anything but I can not recommend enough doing the tutorials first! I hope that helps!

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

shaghayegh — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 12:33:17 GMT

Yes, I have already read the FlexSim HealthCare tutorials and watched the videos on YouTube, but I could not find an exact answer to this issue.

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

shaghayegh — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:13:42 GMT

Thank you so much Julie for your reply. You helped me a lot. Yes, I am familiar with its basic tutorials and I simulated to some extent, but I had problems with the leveling of ESI. I will model and if there is a problem, I will ask for your help again. Thank you again for your help.

this is my email:shaqayq.j.750@gmail.com . Is it possible to contact you for flexSim? If it is possible, I would be happy to send a small message to my email so that I have your email. Thank you

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

shaghayegh — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:18:37 GMT

Julie, is it possible to save and send the simulation in version 2022 and update 2? The FlexSim version that was sent is 2033.

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

julie_weller — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:36:58 GMT

Unfortunately I can't but honestly it's super similar to the tutorials so if you've done those you should be set :)

Re: Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?

shaghayegh — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 16:28:02 GMT

Thank you so much