Process Modeling of ABCDE Primary Survey in Trauma Resuscitations: A Crucial First Step for Agent-Based Simulation Modeling of Complex Team-Based Clinical Processes.

Introduction: Trauma teams are ad hoc, multidisciplinary teams that perform complex patient care and medical decision making under dynamic conditions. The ability to measure and thus understand trauma team processes is still limited. Agent-based simulation modeling (ABSM) can be used to investigate complex relationships and performance within a trauma team.

Data-Driven Design Strategies to Address Crowding and Boarding in an Emergency Department: A Discrete-Event Simulation Study.

Objective: To address prolonged lengths of stay (LOS) in a Level 1 trauma center, we examined the impact of implementing two data-driven strategies with a focus on the physical environment.

Background: Crowding in emergency departments (EDs) is a widely reported problem leading to increased service times and patients leaving without being seen.

Methods: Using ED historical data and expert estimates, we created a discrete-event simulation model.

Forecasting emergency department arrivals: a tutorial for emergency department directors.

This article is a tutorial for emergency department (ED) medical directors needing to anticipate ED arrivals in support of strategic, tactical, and operational planning and activities. The authors demonstrate our regression-based forecasting models based on data obtained from a large teaching hospital's ED. The versatility of the regression analysis is shown to readily accommodate a variety of forecasting situations.

A network flow approach to optimizing hospital bed capacity decisions.

The delivery of cost-effective and quality hospital-based health care remains an important and ongoing challenge for the American health care industry. Despite numerous advances in medical procedures and technologies, a growing array of outpatient health care options, limits on inpatient reimbursements, and almost two decades of hospital contraction and consolidation, annual inpatient admissions in the United States are currently at levels not seen since the early 1980s. This combination of increased demand and diminished resources makes planning for hospital bed capacity a difficult problem for health care decision makers.