Identify Bottlenecks of Patient Flow in Emergency Departments

Patient flow is the movement of patients through a healthcare facility. Over the past decades, healthcare service researchers and providers have spent tremendous efforts in optimizing patient flow and reducing patient waiting time. Identifying bottleneck in health service is an important step to curb long queues. In this paper, we use timed Petri nets to model the patient flow in typical emergency departments (ED). Waiting areas in an ED are modeled with places in a Petri net. A simulation tool is developed that tracks the number of tokens in those places to estimate the length of queues. The average sojourn time of patients in each waiting area is investigated based on simulation results. Strategies to mitigate the bottleneck impact are discussed.