Performance Improvement of ED at VGH Using Simulation and Optimization

Emergency department(ED) is one of the busiest clinical units in Winnipeg Victoria Gen-eral Hospital (VGH) which faces the challenge of patients’ long waiting-time as increas-ing healthcare demand and limited resources. This research investigates the critical factors of the ED operation to enhance the operational efficiency using simulation modeling and optimization. The contribution of this research is the integration of simulation and optimization for the performance improvement of ED operations. Discrete-events simula-tion (DES) methodology provides a cost-effective tool to analyse the performance of the ED operations and evaluates the potential alternatives. Design of experiments (DOE) and Scatter search (SS) of model optimization are proposed to search the ED potential capaci-ty for waiting-time reduction. The patient-flow is accelerated along with the waiting-time reduction, which results in better efficient patient throughput in the ED. A specific strate-gy is suggested to improve the ED operation based on the simulation model.