Application of Risk Management for Discrete Event Simulation Projects in Healthcare Systems

Despite the recent developments of discrete event simulation (DES) techniques as well as the growing tendency for employing DES in health care quite often many DES projects still fail to implement successfully. According to several studies, the application of project risk management can reduce the incidence of DES project failure in health care however, far too little attention has been paid to this part. In this study, a risk management framework is provided for DES projects in health care order to reduce the occurrence of failure and increase the chance of success in the DES project. This work investigates both managerial and technical risks and tries to identify, evaluate, and control them by using a set of adopted methods. Emergency department seems to be the most popular area of DES projects in health care The proposed framework is applied to an emergency department that serves more than 23000 patients per year. The results of this investigation indicate that the risk management of the DES project not only provides a proactive approach for project managers to implement successfully but also improves scenario ranking process which is one of the main outputs for principal stakeholders.