Healthcare services: A systematic review of patient-centric logistics issues using simulation
Sumanta Roy, Shanmugam Prasanna Venkatesan, Mark Goh
Abstract
Healthcare has material-centric external and patient-centric internal logistics. Researchers widely use simulation approaches to model healthcare internal logistics due to the problem complexity. There is a need to map the existing knowledge base to systematically identify the emerging research themes of this domain. This work presents a systematic literature review to identify the patient-centric logistics issues in healthcare modelled using simulation. In all, 583 papers published from 2008 to 2017 in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science database have been collected; 238 articles were shortlisted for the review. Using keyword co-occurrence and cluster analysis, thirteen research clusters are identified, with eight of them central to the research domain and deserving further attention. Among the simulation approaches, discrete event simulation is most prevalent followed by hybrid approaches (that use two or more simulation techniques or simulation combined with analytical methods), system dynamics, agent-based simulation, and Monte Carlo simulation.