A Hybrid Approach to Model Hospitals and Evaluate Wards’ Performances

The degree of connectivity among hospital wards and the dynamic nonlinear flow of the patient cause the bottlenecks to begin from non-priority wards, accumulate within the paths, distribute throughout the hospital, and emerge as an overflow in crucial wards. This requires a network-based modeling approach to address the bottlenecks caused by second and third-order wards and significantly influence the overall and emergent performance of multiple wards. Understanding the relative merits of different network modeling and analysis approaches in this complex environment is often challenging and demands a holistic strategy to identify the persistent bottlenecks and provide evidence-based scenarios. This article introduces a novel hybrid modeling approach that integrates network analysis algorithms and agent-based network simulation of patients’ flow over a complete hospital network. Through network analysis, such as structural hole and flow algorithms, the approach identifies the common persistent bottlenecks from the flow and structural perspectives, and percolation and perturbation analyses measure performance improvement of the wards based on the variations in patients’ flows, and the simulations enable the investigation of scenarios. The results indicate the wards and the patient types that can significantly contribute to improving the hospital’s performance. The proposed approach facilitates the holistic dynamic modeling of hospitals, irrespective of their network scale, and enables the identification of bottleneck sources and their associated paths, contributing to a comprehensive assessment of the system’s performance.