Why is Simulation Used in Healthcare?

Simulation is used to safely test change in a virtual environment.

Healthcare organizations use simulation insight to make stronger decisions that reduce risk to patients, staff and financial investment.

A simulation is a digital model that looks and acts just like real life processes.

Simulations are used to understand how processes and systems work, and how they would behave if a change occured.

SIMUL8 Healthcare provides powerful simulation software that combines your data, predictive analytics and visual models to help you find ways to safely improve the safety, effectiveness, and quality of services.

Any healthcare process can be simulated - from the flow of patients through an emergency department, to the staff schedule for an operating room suite, or the way that patients with particular conditions use health services.

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Why simulate healthcare processes?

Simulation is a powerful predictive analytics and decision making tool for healthcare organizations.

Hospitals and healthcare systems are complex with a huge range of variables that impact performance and patient care. Managing variability, understanding its impact between departments and organizations, and implementing process improvements can be daunting without the right tools.

Simulation gives you the ability to test ‘what if?’ experiments to safely assess the impact of changes across a unit, hospital or entire health system.

It incorporates the real life randomness that you’ll experience every day. Patients are all individual with conditions developing a different rates, they don’t always arrive to appointments on time, and each appointment may take different amount of time, depending on patient needs.

By including this variability, the simulation reflects reality and behaves in the same way as it would in real life.

Where is simulation used in healthcare?

“With ongoing cost reductions and other restrictions within the healthcare environment, our resources are getting to be very precious and scarce, so we need to use simulation tools like SIMUL8 to make sure we are getting the highest performance we can out of the most reasonable amount of resources.”

Jim Scheulen, Chief Administrative Officer, Johns Hopkins

What are the benefits of using simulation for healthcare?

Identify where problems are happening

Simulation can utilize your existing data to form an accurate view of operating rooms, emergency department and inpatient resources within a hospital or health system.

As simulation is visual, it allows you to quickly find problem areas down to individual procedural areas, beds, staff utilization, and more.

Test improvements in a risk-free environment

Simulation uses predictive modeling to show what will happen as a result of process changes or external factors. It enables you to test changes and measure their impact on issues like waiting times, staff scheduling, ED and patient flow, cost structures or any other KPIs.

Using the data and insight from simulation, you can build stronger business cases and stakeholder buy-in.

Confidently plan for the future

Simulation takes the guess work out of strategic planning. With the ability to run scenarios years into the future within seconds, you can assess the impact of strategic and population health changes.

This enables you to make confident decisions that will ensure long-term financial and operational performance.

Why SIMUL8 Healthcare?

SIMUL8 is the healthcare industry’s leading simulation software solution.

Our simulation tools are used by leading healthcare organizations to improve processes, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Working in partnership with our users around the globe for over 20 years, our dedicated healthcare team have developed a wealth of performance improvement experience.

If you would like to learn more about simulation, or have a particular project you’d like to discuss, get in touch.

Contact our team