Recent Simulation Studies in Healthcare: A Review

In recent decades, the dramatic increase in healthcare costs has compelled resarchers and healthcare policy makers to find out new ways to reduce costs. Simulation has become a popular and effective method for improving efficiency and enhancing quality in healthcare operations. The interest of researchers in the domain of simulation studies in healthcare induces a steady increase in the number of publications. In this regard, different discrete-event simulation (DES) studies employed in healthcare field are summarized and classified in this review. A particular attention is on the published studies that involve DES studies of operating rooms. The operating room is specifically the most complicated and expensive hospital resource that runs with high level of uncertainty and limited resources. Moreover, as a result of this review study, deficiencies in the literature about the improvement of the operating room scheduling processes with simulation based optimization method have been determined. In the literature, most of the simulation models only include demand and capacity constraints. However, they should include more constraints such as labor constraints, preferences of surgeons for surgical scheduling, number of available beds in intensive care unit, number of recovery beds, etc. Moreover, there is a need in the field to develop stochastic models, which involve uncertain surgery and recovery times. In most of the studies, it is assumed that these periods are known precisely. It is also determined that number of multi-objective models is quite low. In addition, only a few simulation studies have an online scheduling approach. Thus, these issues need to be addressed. In light of this review, healthcare professionals and researchers can make new suggestions and improvements regarding future research and applications of DES