ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the interaction of different units in the healthcare system and highlights the background of the problems that hospitals and emergency departments along with some possible solutions. The five major components that are badly impacting the healthcare system can be highlighted as follows: timeliness of care, quality of care, errors in care delivery, complexity in healthcare delivery and value of healthcare services. The strength, weaknesses, opportunity, threats (SWOT) analysis is a study based on problem identification and characterization: internal strengths and weaknesses are identified, and external opportunities and threats are analyzed. The SWOT analysis offers decision-makers the recommendations required to alleviate the problems that arise. Three dynamic modeling paradigms can aid in the process of identifying complexity in a healthcare system: Discrete Event Simulation, System Dynamics, and Agent based model. Arena is a very user-friendly tool where a predictive modeling flowchart methodology can be designed in order to facilitate and quickly process a healthcare system.
