Developing domain-specific simulation objects for modeling clinical laboratory operations

Clinical laboratories play a critical role in patient diagnosis, treatment planning and prevention of disease, but, as with all elements of healthcare, they are under increasing pressure to improve performance and reduce costs. Although clinical laboratories reflect many aspects of traditional production systems, the medical profession is, as are most specialized areas of practice, much more willing to entertain analytical methods that describe their systems with domain-appropriate terminology and semantics. In this paper we discuss the development of a framework for creating domain-specific simulation objects for modeling clinical laboratories; we demonstrate their applicability in projects undertaken with the chemistry laboratory at Seattle Children's Hospital. The primary objective of our work is to improve the efficiency of building clinical laboratory discrete-event simulation models.