Modeling Emergency Room Treatment

Hi,

I am trying to model a typical ER, and want to ask expert's advice.
Here is the part that I am struggling with.

Once a patient (FlowItem) is assigned to a bed, several Treatments should be undertaken.
The combination of Treatments is different depending on the patient type (I use a label to represent different patient and the combination of the treatment is also defined in a label table for the patient)
Some of treatments requires operators.

I am thinking of using MultiProcessor for this. (MultiProcessor could be a ER Bed, a patient is assigned to it, and each process defined in the MultiProcessor can be a different treatment.) However, after several trials, I think it might not be the way to do this. Basically, I don't know how to change the combination of the processes dynamically for each different patient.

I thought about defining all possible treatments (processes) in the MultiProcessor and assigning zero processtime for unnecessary tasks depending on the patient type (or combination of treatment). However, I don't think it is a good approach for the case that has a lot of processes (several tens of possible treatments)

Could you please give an advice how to model this situation?
Thank you for the help in advance.

Sung

Sung,

Flexsim now has a Health Care product that was special built to accomodate what you are trying to accomplish. Here is the link: http://www.flexsim.com/products/healthcare/

Brandon

Thank you, Brandon.
It seems a great product! I wish I could have the license. I will keep it in mind.

By the way, just curious...
Without using the product, is modeling the above situation tricky?
I am not trying to devalue the product at all. I believe the HealthCare product is designed to build the above situation very efficiently with other functionalities required Health Care system. But, just want to learn how to handle the ONE part of the situation that requires different processes depending on the different FlowItem type at one location like ER bed. I think this situation could happen not only ER, but many other cases like a FMS work station. One location/machine can handle differernt series of works depending on product.
Please forgive my ignorance, but I would appreciate if you or anybody could give me a tip to model the above situation in regular FlexSim.

Thank you.
Sung

Sung,

Cliff is the one who developed the Healthcare stuff so he will ultimately be able to give you more insight than I. From what I have been able to see with simulations like healthcare they tend to become tricky very quickly if you don't take care to set things up correctly. The reason for this is the way that resources like beds, scanners, wheel chairs, etc. are used. Because they generally can be used by many different items at different steps in the process the flow can become very nasty to stay on top of.

However, in your case you seem to be trying to keep things very simple. I do believe that you could continue to use the Multiprocessor if you want to. I would have the process times be looked up from a table based on the patient type. I would have all of the patients do all of the steps and when I want to skip a step I would just put in a process time of zero. This way I don't have to do anything tricky with flow or trying to chang he process steps on the MP. All of the patients would work the same but behave differently.

Good Luck,
Brandon