Designing effective hybridization for whole system modeling and simulation in healthcare

Wider healthcare provision is typically reliant on a complex choreography of service providers and associated stakeholders. Ambulatory, accident & emergency (A&E), primary care and other services need to be able to react to a number of changes, including demographic and associated funding pressures. Combining Modeling and Simulation (M&S) methods as part of a hybrid simulation is better able to support diverse stakeholder perspectives and more importantly provide a means to collaboratively understand the wider system, offer system insights and robust assumptions across models and calibrate time-specific scenarios as model inputs. A collaborative hybridization approach is required at the outset in order to fully benefit from distinct M&S approaches. This paper presents a hybrid M&S project for non-elective health provision across the wider system. A number of “software” design methods are latterly presented as a means to support requirement gathering, model design and subsequent data flow and simulation integration.