Michigan Simulation User Group

Two Fridays ago we asked you to send us your most used keyboard shortcuts in SIMUL8 and you did! If you missed it, you can read the others here.

• F11 – Open/Close QuickView
• Ctrl+Alt+W – Open the Watch Window.
• Ctrl+Alt – If SIMUL8 is processing a section of Visual Logic this stops the execution and opens the Visual Logic window.
• Ctrl+Left Mouse Click on Show Spreadsheet button – Lets you set the spreadsheet to be displayed when the button is clicked.

The E-health awards celebrate IT innovation in healthcare, and this year SIMUL8 Corporation’s Scenario Generator software has been selected as a finalist in the ‘Healthcare IT product innovation’.

“Healthcare IT has always benefited from a strong relationship between provider organisations and suppliers to generate new products that bring benefits for patients.” E-Health Media

SIMUL8 are delighted to be nominated for such a prestigious award. The winners will be announced at the award ceremony in October, so we’ll keep you posted.

SIMUL8 have been offering hints and tips on Lean Manufacturing in our newsletter for over five years now! Back in 2005 we offered a tutorial on using SIMUL8 to experiment with Lean techniques to improve efficiency – we’ve updated it since then and you can find it here on SIMUL8.com. More recently we’ve added some new information, case studies and more to help make it easy to improve your manufacturing processes using Lean and SIMUL8. Check out our Lean Manufacturing pages and let us know what you think.

Claire Cordeaux, Lead for Healthcare at SIMUL8 Corporation, has been invited to speak at the ‘Transforming Capacity Planning (A European and Local Comparison) Conference’ on the 27th July.

The Conference invites academics to join with expert industrialist supporters to define a future direction for healthcare capacity planning and is being chaired by the ‘Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre’ (HaCIRIC).

Cordeaux says, ‘This is a great opportunity to showcase the fantastic work that is taking place with SIMUL8 and SG, and how both can be used to meet the new targets set out by the Government proposals.’

SIMUL8 Corporation products – SIMUL8 and Scenario Generator (SG) – are used extensively in the NHS in the UK to assist in the development lasting solutions to meet expanding demand while controlling rising costs, and improving productivity.

To coincide with the conference, SIMUL8 Corporation are offering a ‘software and training package’ to healthcare providers in the UK to help to meet the new Government targets.

The package will give providers a copy of SIMUL8 Professional, the industry standard simulation software package, together with training and support for one year for £5,995 (normally £6,995) until the September 29th, 2010. Click here for more details or contact Claire Cordeaux to discuss your requirements.

Read more on SIMUL8 in Healthcare

If you flip an unbiased coin ten times and get 3 heads and 7 tails you could assume from this that the next time you flip a coin you only have a three in ten (30%) chance of the coin landing on heads. This, as everyone would know, is completely untrue.

Taking the simple example of the flipping of a coin as detailed above and making it more complex you can end up with something like the ‘healthcare chance calculator’ found on the BBC news website

The calculator samples from a distribution to determine whether a patient lives or dies following an operation. If you are unlucky you might end up with 20 hospitals that have an unacceptable rating (based on the number of deaths that occur). This is all down to how the coin falls determining the result for each patient.
In real life we can’t rewind and start again. The hospital which has a high number of people dying will be branded as unacceptable and will presumably have action taken against it. In this situation the hospital may not have had complete control over this outcome.

If we were able to rewind and start again using the same figures a patient who died may live. All of a sudden the hospital is sitting clear of the unacceptable category. So what has changed? The doctors are skilled the same (and are still as good), the patient has the same chance of dying – it’s just that chance has flipped its coin and this time the patient survived.

So how does this relate to simulation? Running a simulation once is exactly the same as clicking the ‘calculator’ once. You may be lucky and your hospital is acceptable, you may be unlucky and find yourself on the end of an investigation. We need to run a simulation multiple times to remove the aspect of the model that is purely influenced by chance – leaving us only with the true outcome of the model. So identify your key results, add them to the results summary and run a trial made up of many runs – you wouldn’t want to leave anything down to chance!

We’re updating our Transport and Logistics features in SIMUL8 and this is your chance to get involved.

Click here to complete our short survey and enter your details for your chance to win an iPod touch.

This survey has been compiled by Bukola Bamidele, who is currently interning at our UK headquarters.

Our Support and Web teams are working together to develop brand new resources for our SIMUL8 Education license customers in time for term restarting. If there is anything you’d like to see included, use the form below to let us know.
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