Sensitivity analysis for a whole hospital system dynamics model

Abstract

This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of unit capacity and patient flow for a hospital-wide system consisting of interdependent clinical and ancillary departments. The research employs system dynamics to model a hospital-wide system representative of a medium size, semi-urban, acute care community hospital. A sensitivity analysis using regression methods examines emergency department performance in the context of the hospital-wide system using a modified formulation of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) hierarchy of metrics as a key performance indicator. The modified OEE metric demonstrates its usefulness first for the purpose of conducting a group screening design, and second for the purpose of performing the sensitivity analysis. The main results of the sensitivity analysis indicate that emergency department performance depends significantly on the unit capacity and patient flow in departments hospital-wide. More importantly, the analysis provides quantitative insight into the factors deemed to be important, their interactive relationships across departments, and their overall relative importance. These findings are useful for recommending hospital-wide performance improvement initiatives.