Emergency healthcare resource requirement analysis: A stochastic timed Petri net approach

A health emergency is a situation that poses an immediate risk to health and life and requires urgent intervention to prevent it from getting worse. An efficient clinic workflow and adequate provisioning of various types of resources in an emergency department (ED) help improve the timeliness of emergency care services. Such resources include doctors, physician assistants, registered nurses, registration clerks, examination beds, CT machines, etc. This paper proposes a simulation framework that supports the analysis of optimal provisioning of resources that ensures timely care service and meanwhile incurs no excessive cost from unnecessary resources acquisition. A stochastic timed Petri net based healthcare workflow and resource modeling technique is presented.