Improving patient flow in an obstetric unit

Abstract

Hospitals have become increasingly interested in maximizing patient throughput and bed utilization in all units to improve efficiency. To study tradeoffs in blocking and system efficiency, a simulation model using a path-based approach is developed for an obstetric unit. The model focuses on patient flow, considering patient classification, blocking effects, time dependent arrival and departure patterns, and statistically supported distributions for length of stay (LOS). The model is applied to DeKalb Medical's Women's Center, a large obstetrics hospital in Atlanta, GA, to analyze the hospital's readiness for potential changes to patient mix and patient volume. A comparison of results predicted by the simulation model and actual performance after implementation of "swing" rooms is presented, suggesting the value of implementing "swing" rooms to balance bed allocation.

Improving Out-Patient Flow at An Indian Ophthalmic Hospital

“…Furthermore, the main focus of most of these papers was patient flow control and improvement through the appointment scheduling (see, Natchiar et al, 1994;Cayirli et al, 2006). Distinct from previously developed models like Griffin et al (2012), the key aim of our paper is to improve out-patient flow as well as resource utilization.…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…The settled service mix decision restricts the decisions to serve particular patient groups. Patient groups can be classified based on disease type, demographic information, and resource requirements [221]. In addition, whether patient admissions are elective or not is an influential characteristic on the variability of the operations of inpatient care services [482].…”

“…The case mix decision influences almost all other decisions, in particular the care unit partitioning and capacity dimensioning decisions [26]. Methods: computer simulation [221], heuristics [26,482].…”

“…Therefore, the number of beds needs to be balanced among interdependent inpatient care units [7,66,104,105,221,243,251,259,327,347,451]. Models that consider only a single unit neglect the possibility of admitting patients in a less appropriate care unit and thus the interaction between patient flows and the interrelationship between care units.…”

“…Methods: computer simulation [7,19,104,108,112,156,157,206,221,222,238,241,242,243,244,259,292,295,347,371,372,373,375,415,439,478,497,517,519,523,524], heuristics [309], Markov processes [7,68,172,192,199,245,246,247,335], mathematical programming [127,202,241,318,327,375,376], queueing theory [11,29,…”