Track: Operations Management and Operations Research

Abstract

In oncology departments in hospitals, chemotherapy is one of the main treatments besides radiotherapy and surgery. Depending on the care protocol, patients need to visit the hospital several times to get the drug infusion which could take from 30 minutes to 8 hours. During a hospital appointment, patients go through procedures that may involve various hospital resources. Due to the limited capacity of these resources as well as an increasing number of patients, long waiting times are quite common and cause a negative effect on the quality of care. In this study, we analyze the chemotherapy patient flows an oncology center in Lille (COL), France using Discrete Event Simulation (DES). This simulation study integrates numerous hospital resources as well as different sources of uncertainty to achieve a more practical model. The data for DES are obtained from three sources: electronic health records, expert opinions and a time study. The simulation results allow us to assess the performance of the current system at COL based on two performance measures: average patient waiting time, and nurse utilization. This simulation work will also be used as a basis to evaluate scheduling algorithms proposed for COL to improve chemotherapy patient flow and better utilize hospital resources.