Emergency Department Simulation Model

2021 COE Engineering Design Project (RSA02)


Faculty Lab Coordinator

Reza Samavi

Topic Category

Software Systems

Preamble

Emergency department (ED) wait times in Ontario have consistently been an issue and can be improved through the use of technology. Reducing ED overcrowding and improving the ED’s operational efficiency is an important goal of Ontario healthcare delivery.

Objective

The objective of this project is to develop an analytical system for the emergency department (ED) of a medium size hospital in Ontario for evaluation of resource management and allocation within the ED.

Partial Specifications

1. The system will extract the occupancy patterns of the Emergency department of the ED in the past few years
2. Simulate the effect of alternate resource allocation models,
3. Provide an interactive "what-if" scenario analysis tool for the hospital management team and healthcare policy makers in order to improve the resource utilization and quality of care.
4. The back-end includes the simulation engine
5. the front-end includes a web-based, easy-to-use UI that users without deep knowledge of the simulation model can interact with the system.

Suggested Approach

- An object oriented programming approach is suggested - Java or python is a good choice for this project given the availability of the libraries for the back-end.
- the system should be designed with modularization in mind as the system will use multiple external libraries.
- The suggested approach for the back-end design is using monte-carlo simulation and adapt it for this project.
- For the front-end a web-based design using active server pages is suggested.

Group Responsibilities

The students will analyze the data to see how the current resource allocation pattern creates patient wait time (WT) and length-of-stay (LOS) time longer than expected, identify the uncertainty associated with each event, and develop a tuneable simulation model to predict outcome under different uncertainty patterns. the dataset for the project will be either provided by the hospital if the ERB application is timely and successful or by using an open dataset or a generated synthetic dataset. The back-end of the system will be a monte-carlo simulation model. The simulation model accounts for variability in patients arrivals in terms of different severity levels as well as different rates of patient arrivals. Based on the severity, patients are treated by combinations of multiple resources, often with interspersed waiting time. The front-end of the system allows hospital management teams and policy makers to interact with the simulation model in an easy-to-use manner and investigate the outcome based on different resource allocation scenarios.

Student A Responsibilities

- Leading Requirements elicitation and analysis
- Leading identification and documentation of system specifications
- Ensuring the SDLC is improving according the selected methodology
- Ensuring different modules and sub-modules can be integrated and synced.
- Leading integration test and ensuring software testing and quality assurance.

Student B Responsibilities

- Data collection (search for open datasets or generating synthetic data if necessary)
- data cleaning and preparation
- Data quality assurance
- Data query (and procedures, triggers if necessary) development

Student C Responsibilities

- Identify uncertainty sources and features
- Develop simulation model
- Experimental evaluation of the simulation model

Student D Responsibilities

- Design user interface (UI) module
- Prototyping the system UI
- Running usability test
- Integrate with back-end module

Course Co-requisites

To ALL EDP Students

Due to COVID-19 pandemic, in the event University is not open for in-class/in-lab activities during the Winter term, your EDP topic specifications, requirements, implementations, and assessment methods will be adjusted by your FLCs at their discretion.

 


RSA02: Emergency Department Simulation Model | Reza Samavi | Monday September 6th 2021 at 04:40 PM