Date of Graduation

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering

Committee Chair

Feng Yang

Committee Co-Chair

Wafik H Iskander

Committee Member

Majid Jaridi

Abstract

The high rate of civil commitment in West Virginia indicates that the bureau of mental health in the state has been inefficient and unproductive at facilitating the procedures of mental health system delivery, to the point that the two state hospitals of West Virginia are often at their full capacity and incapable of admitting any new cases. This inadequacy at managing psychiatric emergencies causes frequent diversion of civil committed patients from the state psychiatric hospitals to other community psychiatric units, and ultimately costs the state an un-budgeted {dollar}4 million annually.;The main objective of this research is to contribute to the improvement of the mental healthcare system in West Virginia for psychiatric patients, as well as employees and all the other involved parties which benefit. This is done by optimizing capacity-related decisions at William R. Sharpe, Jr. Hospital, one of the main assigned centers for psychiatric issues in the state.;In order to achieve this outcome, this work intends to first model the arrival process of different psychiatric patients to William R. Sharpe, Jr. Hospital based on data-driven simulation for complex multi-dimensional time series, by applying a flocking algorithm to the available dataset. Including the scheme of simulating patient arrivals, a simulation model is developed to model the patients' arrivals, stay, and departures at the hospital. Sensitivity analysis has been performed to investigate the impacts of various variables such as the capacity of the hospital, the number of patient arrivals of a particular category, etc.

Download

Share

COinS