Modeling patient visits to accident and emergency department in Hong Kong

Simulation emerges as an important technique in recent years for modeling complex operational dynamics in various healthcare institutions and hence providing deep insights for potential improvement. In particular, Accident and Emergency Department (A&ED) has been a place for such research as it accounts for a large proportion of the total hospital visits and admissions. To create a viable simulation for A&ED, accurate description and forecast of patient visits is the foremost step. This paper investigates several contributing factors to A&ED visits, and various time-series methods of modeling A&ED visits with different triage categories and mode of arrival. All the methods are compared in terms of goodness-of-fit and forecast accuracy. The purpose of this research is two-fold. First, this research is part of attempt to build a simulation model for A&ED of a local hospital. Second, the results may be useful for reexamine the resource allocation plan of the A&ED.