Using Queuing Analysis and Computer Simulation Modeling to Reduce Waiting Time in the Hospital Admitting Department

USING QUEUING ANALYSIS AND COMPUTER SIMULATION MODELING TO REDUCE WAITING TIME IN THE HOSPITAL ADMITTING DEPARTMENT Igor Georgievskiy, Zhanna Georgievskaya, William Pinney (Alcorn State University) Donald McWilliams (Texas Wesleyan University) ABSTRACT The Admitting Department is one of the most highly congested hospital services, and faces a great deal of pressure, compared with other components of the health care system. Delays in the AD system may result in difficulties of scheduling services at specialty units and decrease in patient satisfaction. This paper examines the wide-spread problem of extended waiting times for health services, in the context of the Admitting Department (AD) at a regional hospital. In the first phase of the study, a field observation was conducted to document the current operation of the AD. The authors collected actual data over a one-year period for arrivals, waiting times, and service times. These data were categorized by month, day of the week, and time of day. The data were collected for all patient groups within the AD system: outpatients, inpatients, surgical day care patients and so forth. Data were recorded for arrival into the system (waiting time 1 (WT1)), and transition from check-in to financial arrangements processing (waiting time 2 (WT2)) followed by departure from the system (to a specialty unit or out of the system). The flow charts for the admission process were developed. In the second phase of the project, a facility layout analysis provided a proposed redesign of patient flow and changed the number of work stations to alleviate choke points in the system, a proposed scheduling strategy evaluation provided new arrival rate figures, and queuing analysis and queuing simulation were employed by using Quantitative Methods System (QMS) to predict the improvements in waiting times. The third phase of the study was devoted to the building and validation of a computer simulation model of the AD using the FlexsimTM