Improving Health Care Through Computer Simulation

In the morning session at the WSC Conference, Sally Brailsford from the University of Southampton, UK presented an interesting statistic: under 10% of all healthcare simulation studies reported in the massive academic literature were actually implemented! The politics and conflicting stakeholder demands in healthcare present the major hurdles to implementation. This should be contrasted with manufacturing where discrete event simulation has had a major impact on increasing the efficiency of industrial processes. In Tillal Eldabi's presentation, he noted that we are dealing with the "wicked nature of healthcare problems." A wicked problem indeed!