Hospitals can benefit from the insights gained by the industry during the development of digital factories, to create more consistent and highly efficient treatment processes. After all, it is indeed possible to transfer essential aims and objectives, requirements and success factors from the Digital Factory 1:1 to the Digital Hospital. Patient flow simulation as well as surgery simulation take up this principle and transfer it to the hospital environment. Thus a material flow simulation is very similar to the patient flow simulation.

Generally speaking, simulation is a digital tool to present real-life complex processes in a virtual form. Thus simulation is used to depict a kind of “digital hospital” on a computer. Overall objective: It should take only a few clicks to modify and re-calculate the various parameters for a model until they interact in a way that provides an optimum overall result.

Such simulations make sense in particular in the operating room. Surgery belongs to the essential core business within hospitals. This is why it is very important to ensure an efficient and smooth running of the “Surgery” organizational unit, which due to its strong interdisciplinary character has a highly complex structure. The shortest possible changeover times between individual operations ensure optimum utilization of both the operating room as well as the most efficient deployment of staff and resources in general.

In this context the simulation technology is characterized by three main features:

• Cost-benefit analysis:
  In order to save time and costs, in particular with restructuring or new construction projects, it should be checked before their implementation that the steps planned are feasible and can achieve the desired results.
• Viability:
  The knowledge gained can easily be transferred to real life scenarios since all the parameters affecting the real system are already in existence in the simulation. Shift systems, holidays and days of illness, number of staff, malfunctions, surgery programs or individual distances covered are just a few examples for such parameters.
• Future prospects:
  Simulation provides more than an orientation towards the here and now: Simulation can be used, for example, to illustrate the impact an increasing number of patients or of future reforms have on the relevant hospital.

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