Princeton, NJ, USA – If you happen to need a hospital emergency room, you may think that you are interacting solely with the doctor who treats you, but are you? There are many events that must occur in order to treat you (diagnostic tests, nursing skills, sterile facilities and methods for payment, etc.) These simultaneous and interacting events can be modeled using discrete event simulation models (DES).
In the paper, “
Modeling using Discrete Event Simulation: A Report of the ISPOR-SMDM Modeling Good Research Practices Task Force Working Group-4,” expert health care research DES modelers describe best practices for creating these models. Co-author, Dr. James Stahl, MD, CM, MPH, states, “The Good Research Practices guidelines will significantly help investigators understand the range of problems DES may be used for - from constrained resources problems involving interactions between entities and/or their environments to unconstrained problems involving fluid definitions of time. They will help investigators conceive of new solutions to problems they have been struggling with and open their eyes to problems never tackled before.”
This paper is one of the seven papers in the series on modeling study best practices and is jointly published in
Value in Health, the official journal of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR), and
Medical Decision Making, the official journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM).
Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015) publishes papers, concepts, and ideas that advance the field of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research as well as policy papers to help health care leaders make evidence-based decisions. The journal is published bi-monthly and has over 8,000 subscribers (clinicians, decision makers, and researchers worldwide).
International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) is a nonprofit, international, educational and scientific organization that strives to increase the efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness of health care resource use to improve health.
For more information:
www.ispor.org