STREAMLINING THE WORKFLOW AT THE CT SCAN AREAOF A HEALTHCARE PROVIDER

摘要

Radiology services affect the efficiency of patient care in a hospital. With advances in information technology,rnhealthcare organizations have been increasingly implementing systems that record and store the medical informationrnof patients, such as radiology images and reports, in digital formats as opposed to the traditional film-basedrnmethodology. This improves the speed and quality of clinical care by enabling real-time availability of imagingrndata. However, several other organization-wide changes need to be implemented in order to truly realize thernbenefits that can be obtained from digital systems. This research focused on identifying appropriate modifications tornthe existing workflow at the CT scan area of a healthcare provider while transitioning from a film-based imagernarchiving system to a digital system. Apart from the workflow, the flow of information also needed to be modifiedrnand streamlined. The ultimate goal was to maximize patient throughput and minimize report generation time.rnIndustrial engineering tools such as process mapping and time study were used to understand the initial flow ofrnoperations. A Design of Experiments (DoE) based approach was used to identify the effect of the variables in thernsystem and the interaction amongst them. Modeling and simulation was used to analyze and quantify the potentialrnbenefits that could result from the implementation of the digital image archiving system.