SUGGESTIONS TO CONSIDER WHEN ENGAGING IN THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING A SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODEL FOR FREQUENT ATTENDERS IN HEALTHCARE

Abstract: Healthcare systems face many challenges that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Overcoming these challenges can be very difficult in part because of their complexity. Predicting all the possible effects that improvement attempts may create is difficult and high-quality decision support material is difficult to obtain. System dynamics modeling and simulation is a technology that has been applied for some time within the healthcare domain in order to assist the decision-making process. This technology has gained increased interest in the domain over the past decade. This project analyses the application of system dynamics modeling to a specific problem in the healthcare sector, namely that of frequent attenders to the emergency department. A literature review is performed to extract suggestions that could be considered when engaged in the process of developing a system dynamics model for managing frequent attenders in healthcare. It has been found that the research on frequent attenders and their management is very heterogeneous and ambiguous making it difficult to draw strong conclusions about the effectiveness of different management strategies. Model builders are forced to turn to other sources for model data. It is also found that system dynamics modeling of frequent attenders has not yet been done. This situation led to the expansion of the search scope to include related modeling research as the basis for suggestion extraction. 65 suggestions are extracted into three broad categories with the limitation of not being strictly specific to the modeling of frequent attenders, but have a more general nature. And although their value is not evaluated, it is hoped that they could contribute as inspiration to certain system dynamics model development endeavors.