Studying the Effect of Online Medical Applications on Patients Healing Time and Doctors Utilization Using Discrete Event Simulation

Online Medical Applications (OMA) has evolved dramatically in the last few years, and, consequently, the number of patients using it has also grown exponentially. Patients who are seeking non-emergency but immediate medical services or consultant may save time and money by approaching online doctors through OMAs instead of visiting them physically in healthcare centers. Additionally, medical doctors quantity contributing to OMAs growth, which can affect patients average waiting time and the queue size in healthcare centers. In this paper, We have developed a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model to study the effects of using OMA on the patients healing time and doctors utilization by comparing it with the same process in healthcare centers. Additionaly, we compared patients average queue size, maximum number of patients in the queue, and total number of healed patients in our study. The results of this simulation showed that the healing process in OMA could serve the same number of patients in ~46% shorter time compared to healthcare centers with ~5.7% less doctors' utilization.