Key result
A Monte Carlo simulation model demonstrated that the cardiac surgery department could increase its patient throughput from 1,999 to 2,839 patients over 800 days using its current capacity of 10 ICU and 16 post-operative ward beds.
Why the study?
Complex real-world healthcare problems require simulation approaches to estimate length of stay, bed occupancy rate, bed blocking probability, and throughput to optimize resource use in a cardiac surgery department.
Absolute Event Rate: 2839% vs 1999%
Monte Carlo simulation of a cardiac surgery department revealed that optimizing bed allocation between the ICU and post-operative ward could increase patient throughput by approximately 43% without adding new resources.
Simulation estimates BOR, LOS, and throughput in cardiac surgery; leaves open real-world validation before guiding policy.
Bed occupancy rate (BOR) is important for healthcare policymakers. Studies showed the necessity of using simulation approach when encountering complex real-world problems to plan the optimal use of resources and improve the quality of services. So, the aim of the present study is to estimate average length of stay (LOS), BOR, bed blocking probability (BBP), and throughput of patients in a cardiac surgery department (CSD) using simulation models. We studied the behavior of a CSD as a complex queueing system at the Farshchian Hospital. In the queueing model, customers were patients and servers were beds in intensive care unit (ICU) and post-operative ward (POW). A computer program based on the Monte Carlo simulation, using Python software, was developed to evaluate the behavior of the system under different number of beds in ICU and POW. The queueing simulation study showed that, for a fixed number of beds in ICU, BOR in POW decreases as the number of beds in POW increases and LOS in ICU increases as the number of beds in POW decreases. Also, based on the available data, the throughput of patients in the CSD during 800 days was 1999 patients. Whereas, the simulation results showed that, 2839 patients can be operated in the same period. The results of the simulation study clearly demonstrated the behavior of the CSD; so, it must be mentioned, hospital administrators should design an efficient plan to increase BOR and throughput of patients in the future.
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Mohammadi et al. (2022) studied Cardiac surgery (n=1,999). Optimized bed utilization via Monte Carlo simulation vs. Current hospital performance was evaluated on Patient throughput over 800 days. A Monte Carlo simulation model demonstrated that the cardiac surgery department could increase its patient throughput from 1,999 to 2,839 patients over 800 days using its current capacity of 10 ICU and 16 post-operative ward beds.
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