Patient Turnaround Times at Emergency Rooms (ER)

"Patient Turnaround Time" (or PTAT) is the time that elapses between the arrival and discharge of patients from the Emergency Department (ED). The goal of this research endeavor was to minimize the PTAT at one of the prominent EDs in Broome County, which is located within the Wilson Memorial Hospital. Minimization of the 'patient turnaround time' has several advantages such as faster service to patients, improved customer satisfaction and higher potential to generate revenue for the hospital. Industrial Engineering concepts and methods were used to streamline key activities and develop new strategies in order to maximize the efficiency of the ED. This involved the use of quantitative and qualitative techniques to identify the efficient utilization of space, time, and resources without compromising the quality of patient care. Computer simulation models of the ED were built in order to evaluate the different 'what-if' scenarios. The recommendations provided to the ED could result in saving 10-30% of the time from the overall PTAT. Consequently, more than 10% additional patients could be treated by the ED per year. The proposed recommendations would not require any additional capital investment or an increase in the number of personnel.

Patient Turnaround Times at Operating Rooms (OR)

The 'optimum' utilization of the ORs is a key to deliver cost effective and efficient patient care. This research is oriented towards developing solutions to maximize the utilization of a suite of ORs at two hospital locations while concurrently improving customer satisfaction. The two hospitals, namely Wilson Memorial and Binghamton General are a part of the United Health Services (UHS) group of hospitals. The activities associated with the ORs were closely studied and mapped. Solutions that were expected to improve the utilization of the ORs have been proposed. Simulation modeling is being used to assess the impacts and benefits of the proposed solutions vis-¨¤-vis the performance of the ORs. The first stage of this research has been completed. This stage included providing solutions to improve the utilization of the ORs that specifically cater to cardiac surgeries.

Ancillary departments, which include radiology services, are among the important factors that affect the efficiency of patient care in a hospital. Recently, healthcare organizations have been increasingly implementing systems that record and store the medical information of patients such as radiology images and reports in digital formats as opposed to the traditional paper form. This transition is expected to improve the speed and quality of clinical care by enabling real-time availability of imaging data from any location. However, several other organization-wide changes are required to be implemented in order to truly harvest the benefits out of the digital systems. This research focused on identifying appropriate modifications to the existing workflow at the CT Scan area of a leading hospital while transitioning from a film-based image archiving system to a digital system. The ultimate goal was to maximize patient throughput and minimize report generation time in the CT scan area. Process mapping and time study were used to identify the original flow of operations. Various different quantitative techniques were considered in order to solve the problem under consideration. Simulation was used as a proactive tool to evaluate the different scenarios that were expected to 'optimize' the response variables, namely the patient throughput and the report generation time. Several other key suggestions were also presented and validated using simulation. These include increasing the number of radiologists, reallocation of CT Scan machine resources and addition of a patient holding area. The proposed modifications could reduce report generation times by approximately 60% and increase in patient throughput by up to 40%.