Modeling and Simulation of Disaster Medicine Processes for Resilience Assessment of Hospital BCPs

Abstract

Business continuity planning and management (BCP/BCM) is crucial for enterprises such as hospitals and healthcare agencies. However, there is no established method to evaluate the effectiveness and resilience of BCP. In this study, we develop a model for the in-hospital medical processes and resource usage required in mass casualty events. The process model is based on records from two hospitals that accepted several people injured in the Formosa Fun Coast Dust Explosion that occurred in Taiwan in 2015. We conducted a simulation to replicate the situation in the two hospitals for model verification and validation and confirmed that the simulation results were consistent with the actual data to some extent. The model developed in this study can be used to observe and compare the details of the disaster medicine processes under different settings and scenarios; thus, the model may be utilized for BCP evaluations.