Designing Patient Flow Simulation for Inpatient Care

[amyhyolee]

[ FlexSim 21.2.4 ]

I understand how to simulate the patient flow for outpatient visits where patients come to the hospital, receive treatment, and then leave. However, I'm not sure how to design the patient flow for hospitalized inpatients because they remain within the hospital as they are transferred between wards and departments. Can you give me some advice?

I'm also wondering if, for hospitalized inpatients, we need to input the admission and discharge dates/timestamps into the simulation program to accurately represent their admission and discharge processes. Do we need to create labels for each patient indicating their departure location, destination, admission time, discharge time, and so on, to reflect their details in the simulation?

[kavika_faleumu · Accepted solution]

Hey @Amy, with regards to your first question on handling inpatients moving between wards/departments, patients in the healthcare environment are generally represented through Process Flow tokens that flow through a set of steps they take while in the facility. Two ways to model them that come to mind are to either (1) move the token that represents that patient to a separate section of your Process Flow that represents that ward/department, or (2) you can spawn another token in that separate section of Process Flow that represents that patient.

Regarding your second question, I think you're going about it in the right way. It's a good practice to keep track of the statistics you want to track, and labels are a great way to do that. You can also make a statistics collector to gather specific data you want.

[amyhyolee]

Thank you for you answer @Kavika F.

When labeling patients, is it appropriate to define them as 1 if they move from room1 to room2, 2 if they move from room2 to room3, and so on? After defining them this way, I'm not sure how to inform the patients about the locations of the rooms.

[kavika_faleumu]

I think it may be more informative for the patient to label the rooms with pointers. They let you reference a physical location in the 3D space so you can easily tell a patient to go to the location their label points to.

[amyhyolee]

Thank you for your answer @Kavika F.

I want to use pointers to assign rooms to the 'From' and 'To' within 'Arrivals / Source - Arrival Schedule', but despite reading the documentation and watching videos, I still don't understand it well.

20230319_pointers.fsm

[kavika_faleumu]

@Amy, here's an example of how to set a pointer as a label.

In this gif, I demonstrate how to do this. First, add a label and set it's data to pointer. I changed the name of the label to "Source", but you can make it whatever you want (like "From" or "To"). Then click on the value cell next to it (should have a purple 0x0 in it denoting there is no current pointer).

In the top right above that cell, you should see an eye drop icon. Click on that. This lets you enter "sampling" mode, which allows you to click on another item in the 3D space. Once it's done, you should see a purple path/name linked to the object.

[amyhyolee]

Thank you, @Kavika F. I understand the part where I can add a label with a pointer. However, I feel like I need to define the patients from the beginning based on labels because the patients aren't shown before I click run. Is it impossible to define that from the source? I don't see any pointers in 'Arrivals / Source - Arrival Schedule.'

[kavika_faleumu]

@Amy, you can add those labels in the "Arrivals" Process Flow of your patient flow.

Open the quick properties of the Source, click "Edit Arrivals", and a window will popup allowing you to edit the schedule. There, you can add labels to patients that are spawned.