Reliability, health care, and simulation

Reliability theory is a very matured subject and a lot has been written (and still much research is going on) on this subject. Healthcare system is currently getting a lot of attention due to escalating costs and the constant increase in the number of people requiring healthcare. In this paper, we outline how reliability theory along with simulation can be put to great use in healthcare industry. It should be pointed out that this is not an exhaustive study of comparing one area to another to its fullest but rather an attempt to see how one can use the set up of reliability to look at the healthcare system in a macroscopic way. Modeling a human as a reliability system with many subsystems, we look at the mean time to failure as well as the quality of the life of the system through simulation, which is carried out with the help of ARENA software.