Abstract for: Systemic Conceptual Modeling of Patient Flow in a Hospital Emergency Department: A case example

Managing patient flow in the emergency department is critical for the overall performance of the hospital, as this is the primary source of variability in the overall hospital operation. Making a conceptual model of any complex social system is one of the hardest tasks in the modeling and simulation process. Especially, in the case of patient flow in an emergency department context, as long experience with the system itself is needed and time for model development with experts and clinicians is scarce. This paper suggests a methodology for constructing the conceptual model of patient flow in the emergency department in an effective manner using established systemic tools from systems analysis. The tools are chosen carefully to cover specific needs identified in the established methodology of the model building process found in the classical literature. The proposed way of making a conceptual model was shown to catalyze the process of extracting important patient flow information in a case organization.