Simulation for Modeling and Analysis of Burn Center

Burn Centers are emergency departments that play a critical role in patient care. The goal of this research is to develop a model of the burn center to identify bottlenecks and evaluate performance improvement approaches. We have used the discrete event simulation (DES) approach to model a regional burn center, and its current processes based on empirical data. Sensitivity analysis is carried out to study the effect of perturbing control parameters such as the number of beds (B) and a number of arrivals (A) at the burn center on key performance metrics which include utilization, availability of beds, average waiting time for a bed, and average time spent at the burn center. By reducing the number of beds by 2 and unnecessary arrivals (referrals) at the burn center by 10%, there will be a significant improvement in performance measures and revenue of the burn center. The 10% reduction in arrivals is achieved after proper diagnosis. This leads to a 33.33 % savings in the burn center revenue.