Simulating staff activities in healthcare environments: An empirical multi-agent modeling approach

Abstract

The layout of the healthcare environment profoundly impacts healthcare efficiency, safety, employee satisfaction, and the sustainability of operations, mainly based on occupant behavior analysis. However, due to the increase in professionalism and interprofessional collaboration among healthcare practitioners and the complexity of the physical environment, existing research tools face challenges in describing and analyzing diverse occupant behaviors. This study aims to offer an empirically grounded multi-agent modeling approach as a research tool to simulate and reproduce occupant behavior within healthcare settings. Employing a design science research method, the proposed approach encompasses four stages: empirical data collection, development of behavioral rules, agent-based modeling, and validation. A continuous 24-h observational study involving doctors, nurses, and auxiliary staff within a trauma intensive care unit is conducted to demonstrate the development and application process. Results show that the proposed modeling approach achieves a simulation deviation of 8.31 % in individual walking distances and a 16.26 % deviation in overall staff spatial visitation frequency compared to real-world observations. We believe that using simple if-then rules to represent events and probability rules to describe other basic activities can simulate complex staff activities in a healthcare environment. Interdisciplinary expert evaluation acknowledged the utility of this approach. This study offers a comprehensive dataset of behaviors and contributes methodologically to evaluating the efficiency of built environment layouts. The innovation in this study lies in its scalability, extending from events and individuals to encompass the all staff in levels of modeling and validation, ensuring a consistent alignment with empirical data at each stage.