A Generic Modeling Approach towards Simulating an Urban Primary and Secondary Healthcare Facility Network

We present a discrete-event simulation model of patient flow operations across public primary and secondary healthcare facilities in an Indian urban district. We made in-person visits to dispensaries, primary urban health centers (PUHCs), and polyclinics to collect operational information regarding service times, patient arrival rates, and medical resource capacities. We estimated probability distributions of the service times of healthcare providers using goodness-of-fit tests. We used a generic modeling approach to develop simulation models for each facility type and later integrated them into a network simulation. We evaluated operational metrics including average resource occupancies, average waiting time, and lengths-of-stay estimates in real-time across the network. We investigated how services would be provided to patients by varying capacities of resources experiencing bottlenecks in the network. Our hierarchical and multi-service network simulation is reusable that can be adapted via a network generic modeling approach to other similar facilities in the Indian and International context.