Brilliant Answer Peers

Discussion: Simulation for Performance Improvement

As you have examined this week, simulation as an analytic tool can assist healthcare administration leaders execute important improvement initiatives. Simulations can be used to determine the impact of hospital outbreaks, shortages in staff, potential disaster events, or even financial challenges that might impact healthcare delivery for a health services organization. As a current or future healthcare administration leader, the ability to use simulation as an analytic technique will help you execute sound decision making to tackle healthcare administration challenges.

For this Discussion, review the resources for this week, and consider those issues that might most affect healthcare administration practice. Consider how those issues might be addressed through the process of using simulation as an analytic technique, and reflect on how you might apply the process of simulation to address these issues.

By Day 3

Post an explanation of how simulation might be used to improve performance in your health services organization or one with which you are familiar. Be specific, and provide examples.

Discussion

Continue the Discussion and respond to your colleagues in one or more of the following ways:

Each Colleagues 250 words or more (Colleague 1 250 words, Colleague 2 250 words, Total 500 words):

· Ask a probing question, substantiated with additional background information, evidence, or research.

· Share an insight from having read your colleagues' postings, synthesizing the information to provide new perspectives.

· Offer and support an alternative perspective, using readings from the classroom or from your own research in the Walden Library.

· Validate an idea with your own experience and additional research.

· Make a suggestion based on additional evidence drawn from readings or after synthesizing multiple postings.

· Expand on your colleagues' postings by providing additional insights or contrasting perspectives based on readings and evidence.

Click on the Reply button below to reveal the textbox for entering your message. Then click on the Submit button to post your message.

Colleague 1

When using simulation in healthcare, it is used to imitate real-life situations. It is compared to other mathematical models, but the focus is to explicitly incorporate uncertainty in one or more input variables (Albright, & Winston, 2017). When looking at improving the performance in healthcare organizations one of the focuses is the costs and benefits of simulation, which are difficult to determine, especially for the most challenging applications, where long-term use may be required. Various driving forces and implementation mechanisms can be expected to propel simulation forward, including professional societies, liability insurers, healthcare payers, and ultimately the public. The future of simulation in healthcare depends on the commitment and ingenuity of the healthcare simulation community to see that improved patient safety using this tool becomes a reality (Gaba, 2007). Simulation use in the health professions is not new. There are many examples of simulation use in dentistry, nursing, and medicine that go back to the early 1900s. Many studies have found that simulation can improve patient safety (Groves et al., 2018). This is due to a variety of reasons, with repetition being a significant reason for improved team performance. Regardless of the discipline, health care or otherwise, we are all conducting simulation for the same reasons and that is to reproduce an event or system before it happens or before the skills are required to engage in that system. We want to anticipate any problems or to find out if there are unanticipated issues that we might encounter. We simulate all sorts of things. We simulate to experiment complex situations while minimizing risk. In health care, the overall objective is to improve patient safety and health professional skill sets.

 

References

Albright, S. C., & Winston, W. L. (2017). Business analytics: Data analysis and decision making (6th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

· Chapter 15, "Introduction to Simulation Modeling"

Gaba D. M. (2007). The future vision of simulation in healthcare. Simulation in healthcare : journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, 2(2), 126–135. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.SIH.0000258411.38212.32

Groves P.S., Bunch J.L., Cram E. & Perkhounkova Y. (2018). Development and feasibility testing of a patient safety research simulation.Clinical Simulation in Nursing. 15: 27-33

Colleague 2

A simulation is a powerful technique that looks and acts as a real-life process. Simulations are used to understand how processes and systems work and how they would behave if a change occurred. Simulation combines data, predictive analytics, and visual models to help find ways to safely improve the safety, effectiveness, and quality of services (Bruce, 2021). Any healthcare process can be simulated.

Simulation utilizes existing data to form accurate views of operating rooms, emergency departments, and inpatient resources within healthcare systems. The visualization of simulation quickly finds problem areas down to individual procedural areas, beds, staff utilization, etc. Moreover, simulation utilizes predictive analytics to show what will happen due to process changes or external factors, enabling testing changes and measuring their impact. Using the data and insight from simulation can generate more robust business cases and stakeholder buy-in. Simulation takes the hypothesizing out of strategic planning, transforming scenarios and enabling confident decisions to ensure long-term financial and operational performance.

 Bruce, D. (2021, May 5). How Can Simulation Software Be Used In Healthcare. Knowledgenile. https://www.knowledgenile.com/blogs/how-can-simulation-software-be-used-in-healthcare/