Modeling patient flow according to ESI triage in the emergency department?
Accepted solution
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:
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!
