Date of Award

Spring 2005

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Program/Concentration

Computer Engineering

Committee Director

Frederic D. McKenzie

Committee Member

Lee A. Belfore II

Committee Member

Roland R. Mielke

Call Number for Print

Special Collections LD4331.E55 A43 2005

Abstract

The high possibility of having a mass casualty incident compels hospitals to plan ahead in order to sufficiently provide the healthcare needed to as many casualty victims as possible. The Emergency Rooms (ER) are usually hospitals' main entrance for many casualties. Therefore, the ER in the Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters (CHKD) was selected as the system to be examined. The ER in CHKD, the only specialized pediatric ER in the region, already struggles to handle very high patient arrival rates. Consequently, it is expected that treating a large number of patients surviving within a very short period of time will cause major panic and randomness in the ER, which will conclusively affect the quality of healthcare provided to the casualty victims. For this reason, the ER in CHKD was modeled and simulated to study patient flow under regular conditions. In addition, the Simulation-based Real-time Decision Making (SRDM) method was implemented as a software application and appended to the ER model. The objective of implementing the SRDM was to provide the capability of simulating the ER under multiple sets of resources. This assists in evaluating the ER performance under different resource capacities, especially when simulating a mass casualty event by increasing the ER patients' survival rate.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/tdvg-f356

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