Towards a dynamic healthcare process : from requirement capture to simulation

Both process modelling and simulation play an important role in understanding healthcare processes. Since IDEF0 can effectively capture requirements and is relatively easy to communicate, combining IDEF0 with simulation provides a promising way to analyse processes dynamically and to assist in decision-making. This paper explores the feasibility of building an environment that can be used to simulate real IDEF0 models for healthcare processes. EXPRESS language is used to capture the required information that would make an IDEF0 model capable of simulation. An example IDEF0 model simulator is developed in order to explore some of the issues in simulating healthcare processes. A prototype system structure for this simulator is provided in the paper. The healthcare process is used as an example application in this paper. An example IDEF0 model for "Identify Patient Safety Hazards" process represented by XML is loaded and simulated.