An investigation of Hybrid Simulation for modeling sustainability in healthcare

There is increasing awareness among stakeholders in healthcare that the present day reforms in this sector need to be structured around financial, environmental and social sustainability. This arguably serves as a motivation to investigate ways to incorporate sustainable development measures into their planning cycles, and furthermore to implement these plans through delivery of sustainable services. Use of Modeling & Simulation (M&S) is essential for such planning as it provides the stakeholders with a tool to experiment with alternative strategies and to evaluate the resultant simulation output in terms of both productivity-related criteria and sustainability-related metrics. This paper presents a hybrid M&S approach for sustainability analysis that relies on both “Discrete” and “Continuous” elements for the purpose of modeling strategic and operational aspects of the underlying healthcare system. An existing case study is discussed through the lens of the proposed new Hybrid Simulation Framework for TBL Modeling (HSF-TBL).