Discrete event simulation to analyze patient priorization in the context of an emergency department

Abstract

Objective: With the growth of the demand flow and its variability at an emergency department, the complexity to deal with the prioritization of assistance also increases, seeking to offer a quality service. In this sense, several systematized risk triage protocols were created to organize the queues at the emergency, establishing an order of service to ensure that patients do not wait more than a safe time to receive their first medical care. Therefore, the objective of this work is to analyze and evaluate the behavior of an emergency department using a discrete event simulation model. For the results, it was possible to better understand the patient flow, identify problems and difficulties in the system, propose alternatives to deal with patient prioritization, and evaluate the performance of these alternatives through the Goal Question Metric methodology.