Quantitative Methods in Health Care Management: Techniques and Applications, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 15

SIMULATION

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Describe the concept of simulation and its use in health care services.

• Review the components of simulation modeling.

• Design a simple simulation problem in a health services organizational setting.

Simulation can be applied to a wide range of problems in health care management and operations. In its simplest form, health care managers can use simulation to explore solutions with a model that duplicates a real process, using a what if approach. In this way they can enhance decision making by capturing situations that are too complicated to model mathematically (like queuing problems). Consider construction of a spreadsheet with a financial planning model of a health care institution with many parameters. ...