A SIMULATION FRAMEWORK FOR THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF HEALTHCARE CLINICS

The treatment of patients in outpatient healthcare clinics is a continually growing trend as technology improves and recovery benefits are recognized. In this paper, we focus on the operational aspects of clinics that will impact clinic design decisions relative to productivity, efficiency, and quality of patient care. We develop a generalized Healthcare Clinic Design Simulator (HCD-Sim) to study the dynamic system behavior and to analyze alternative outpatient healthcare clinic designs. Our simulation framework is designed to have a data-driven structure that is able to represent a large class of outpatient healthcare clinics through the specification of clinic data relative to patient flows, work flows, and resource requirements. We describe our methodology and demonstrate the capabilities of experimentation utilizing the simulation framework.