Building Whole of Hospital Digital Twins
- Mar 20
- 2 min read
On March 5-6, the first “Building Whole Hospital Digital Twins – a Practical Workshop” was held in the Department of Engineering Science and Biomedical Engineering (ESB) at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland (WTR|UoA). The workshop was supported by Te Pūnaha Matatini (TPM), the AI in Health Research Network, the Julius von Haast Fellowships, and ESB. The workshop was presented by Assoc Prof Mike O’Sullivan (from the AI in Health Research Network, TPM and ESB), Dr Melanie Reuter-Oppermann (Julius von Haast Fellow, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt) and Dr Tom Adams (ESB). It was a small, hands-on workshop with participants from across Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora. Workshop participants were walked through the use of conceptual modelling to represent a generic whole-of-hospital model using Hierarchical Control Conceptual Modelling (HCCM), an approach developed in particular for healthcare digital twins.
Participants were invited to provide feedback on the HCCM model, which led to a more detailed surgery submodel for the next iteration of the whole-hospital conceptual model.
Dr Adams and Assoc Prof O’Sullivan – within their research group ORUA – have developed a library to build HCCM models in the leading open-source simulation JaamSim. Participants were provided with the JaamSim/HCCM whole hospital digital twin and supported to get this up and running on either their own device or a lab machine (within the computer lab the workshop was running in). The workshop finished with the whole hospital digital twin being modified to match one of the participants' data, and two different workflow scenarios were thenimplemented and compared using the digital twin.
This first (experimental) workshop, although small, was very successful in introducing participants to the conceptual modelling approach to digital twins, validating and extending the whole hospital digital twin with the workshop leaders and participants working together and giving workshop participants hands-on experience with digital twins in practice.
Hopefully, a second iteration of this workshop won’t be too far away.
If you're interested in future sessions, please contact michael.osullivan@auckland.ac.nz
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