Emergency departments are currently facing major pressures due to rising demand caused by population growth, aging and high expectations of service quality. With changes continuing to challenge healthcare systems, developing solutions and formulating policies require a good understanding of the complex and dynamic nature of the relevant systems. However, as a typically complex system, it is hard to grasp the non-linear association between macro-level features and micro-level behavior for a systematic understanding. Instead of describing all the potential causes of this complex issue, in this paper we present a layer-based application framework to discover knowledge of an emergency department system through simulating micro-level behaviors of its components to facilitate a systematic understanding. Finally, case studies are used to demonstrate the potential use of the proposed approach. Results show that the proposed framework can significantly reflect the non-linear association between micro-level behavior and macro-level features.
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