Abstract
In Pakistan most of the local hospitals have limited resources and budget deficits to address day-to-day routine activities. This is further intensified by inefficient management of hospital resources. Hence, it is essential to efficiently manage hospital resource as it will lead to health care costs reduction and increased patient’s satisfaction. The focus of this research is to demonstrate the use of the tool in healthcare system, specifically in Pakistan, and balance the resources of a hospital, which will reduce the waiting time for the Outdoor Patients Departments. The resources at the Outdoor Patients Department including X-ray, Labs, Ultrasound and the ECG sections were included in the computer-based simulation model with the aim to find the bottleneck departments as they are the main cause of waiting time in the hospital. These bottlenecks are anticipated due to the lack of an optimized model, which has been addressed in this simulation. Based on the simulation study an optimized model is proposed to the hospital administration where the resources are readjusted resulting in the utilization of underutilized departments and decreasing the waiting time of the stations particularly the bottleneck stations. The motivation behind this research is to aid hospitals in better management of resources, which can ultimately improve customers (patients) satisfaction.
Highlights
Simulation is widely used tool in the healthcare industry and arguably one of the most principal tools of operational research
This paper presents study of how the changes in resources can affect the performance of a hospital, specially the outpatient department
The second step is about system definition, where all components are to be identified in the process flow for the Outdoor Patient Department (OPD) with definition of performance measures including waiting time, utilization of resources etc
Summary
Simulation is widely used tool in the healthcare industry and arguably one of the most principal tools of operational research. It is due to these features that simulation is one of the most popular methods used by healthcare professionals to study complex processes, organizational and human behavior among others [2]. The modeling of a hospital processes with the help of simulation can be very useful in order to find the parameters such as, efficiency, utilization, service time and throughput of a hospital [3]. Simulation is the only tool with the help of which intricate interactions within processes can be determined. Some factor like test results, acuity level, equipment availability, staff schedules, care giver skills, facilities and competition among patients for resources could impact parameters such as service time, utilization and throughput [4]
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