Quality assessment of input data for emergency department simulation

Abstract

Emergency Departments (EDs) constitute an important component in a healthcare system. Recently, they are confronted with a substantial growth in demand. Combined with the ever tightening budgets, this has led to the problem of overcrowding in many EDs. Simulation has been widely used in operations management research for analysing and improving patient flow in EDs. The quality of input data is of great importance to build a realistic simulation model. In this paper, data quality problems in healthcare records of emergency departments are identified based on a case study in a Belgian university hospital. The problems are categorised and data quality assessment techniques are developed for each category. A combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics is described to estimate the potential impact of the data quality issues on simulation.