Explorative modeling for prioritizing liver transplantation waiting lists

Health care systems are known to be quite complex in structure and operation. The technology of liver transplantation is one of the aspects of health care systems that has always been difficult to grasp. The main problem with liver transplantation is the fact that it is not easy to study using traditional quantitative tools. The paper demonstrates the use of discrete event simulation as an explorative tool to help stakeholders to understand the behavior of the system so that they can achieve informed decisions with regard to the prioritization of patients waiting for transplantation. The paper also shows the construction of a tailor-made package (LiverSim) and provides an example of how this package is used by the stakeholders to assist in the evaluation process. Some final lessons are drawn that simulation helps in exploring more issues outside the boundaries of quantitative results.