About Patrick Dugan

I’m a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and a semi-retired operations consultant based in Canandaigua, New York. My focus is narrow and specific: why emergency departments struggle with boarding, walkouts, and long waits even when the staff is skilled and working hard — and what actually fixes it.

The honest answer, most of the time, is that emergency departments are stochastic, nonlinear systems, and the tools hospitals normally use to plan them — spreadsheets, staffing ratios, comparisons to a “similar” hospital — are built for simpler, more linear problems. I’ve sat in a real ED myself waiting three hours for a CT scan and an hour for the read, and only got the slot because someone else canceled. That’s not a staffing failure. It’s a shared-resource scheduling problem, invisible from inside any one department, and it’s exactly the kind of problem this work exists to find.

I don’t build a simulation model from a blank page for every hospital. I work from a single, already-validated discrete-event simulation harness — the arrivals, the boarding logic, the shared-resource contention, the library of pre-built intervention scenarios — and tweak it to represent your ED specifically: your CMS numbers, your bed counts, your staffing. That’s the difference between a months-long modeling project and a fast path straight to solution generation.

That’s the gap ED Simulation Solutions fills: discrete-event simulation used as an experimental harness, calibrated to a hospital’s own real numbers, used the way healthcare operations researchers like Alexander Kolker have long argued it should be — as a distinct management discipline, not a one-off IT project, standing alongside clinical management as an equally rigorous function.

The flagship work behind this practice is a fully calibrated discrete-event simulation of a 113-bed community hospital in upstate New York — built against that hospital’s own CMS-published performance data, tested against a battery of real intervention scenarios, and priced using the same dark-green/light-green dollar accounting the Institute for Healthcare Improvement developed to keep improvement claims honest.

Credentials

Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt (LSSMBB)  •  Discrete-Event Simulation (ProcessModel)  •  Canandaigua, NY