SIMULATION STUDY FOR PROCESS IMPROVEMENT OF THE NON-URGENT CARE PROCESS IN A HOSPITAL EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT

摘要

We consider a non-urgent care process, called Fast-Track (FT), at the emergency department of a local hospital. A simulation model that was built based on the observation of the hospital helps identify bottlenecks of patient flows in the current process. We first propose an improved process where the workload of the staff is distributed in a more balanced way, and spaces are utilized in a more efficient way by increasing the capacity of the inside waiting room. Furthermore, we introduce an additional option to patients so that they can choose to come back at a later time instead of waiting for time-consuming test results. A simulation study of the proposed process revealed that the average patient wait time in the waiting room is reduced by up to 63%. Also, in the proposed process, the average visit length of the patients who need only prescription without any examination or imaging has reduced to 44 min/patient, which is a 28% decrease from 61 min/patient of the current process. Besides, since the proposed process has more balanced workload, it can potentially reduce the burnouts of certain staff members. A sensitivity analysis displays the robustness of the proposed process. Increasing the patient arrival rates by 10% and 20%, the patient cycle times are increased by 7.2% and 15.3%, respectively. Moreover, for the patients who need only prescription, the waiting times are increased to 49 minutes and 58 minutes, respectively.