Evaluating Different Strategies on the Blood Collection Counter Settings to Improve Patient Waiting Time in Outpatient Units

Abstract

Long patient waiting time is one of the major problems in the healthcare system and it would decrease patient satisfaction. Previous studies usually investigated how to improve the treatment flow in order to reduce patient waiting time or length of stay. The studies on blood collection counters have received less attention. Therefore, the objective of this study is to reduce the patient waiting time at outpatient clinics for metabolism and nephrology outpatients. A discrete-event simulation is used to analyze the four different strategies for blood collection counter resource allocation. Through analyzing four different strategic settings, the experimental results revealed that the maximum number of patients waiting before the outpatient clinics was reduced from 41 to 33 (20%); the maximum patient waiti-ng time at the outpatient clinics was decreased from 201.6 minutes to 83 minutes (59%). In this study, we found that adjusting the settings of blood collection counters would be beneficial. Assigning one exclusive blood collection counter from 8 to 10 am is the most suitable option with the least impact on the operational process for hospital staff. The results provide managerial insight regarding the cost-effective strategy selection for the hospital operational strategy.

A Study on Decision-Making for Improving Service Efficiency in Hospitals

“…Efforts to elevate medical quality have predominantly revolved around enhancing various aspects of medical performance, such as the reduction in length of stay (LOS) in emergency departments, improved appointment scheduling [4][5][6][7][8][9][10], and optimized resource allocation [11][12][13][14]. However, a crucial yet often overlooked component of hospital operations is the role of hospital porters, known as non-clinic service personnel.…”

Safety tests and clinical research on buccal and nasal microneedle swabs for genomic analysis

“…Blood collection is commonly used because blood circulates throughout tissues and biomarkers such as DNA are abundant in blood ( Yip et al, 2017 ; Donohue et al, 2019 ). However, this method has several disadvantages: significant pain caused by the syringe, difficulty in collecting blood from the elderly, the risk of infection, and the necessity of medical expertise ( Vagnoli et al, 2015 ; Cheng et al, 2016 ; Fukuroku et al, 2016 ; Chen et al, 2022 ). Swabs, on the other hand, are easy use, cause less pain, and thus facilitate greater patient compliance ( Walker et al, 1999 ; McBride et al, 2010 ).…”