Driving Improvement in Outpatient Phlebotomy Wait Times through Data, Systems, and Behaviors

Patient Flow Analysis in General Hospitals: How Clinical Disciplines Affect Outpatient Wait Times

Background: Overcrowding is an important problem for outpatient services in healthcare facilities. Patient flow analysis (PFA) is a useful method for identifying inefficiencies in and facilitating patient flow. Objective: PFA was used to estimate patient wait time and determine how different clinical disciplines impact wait times in the studied hospital.<...

Optimal Scheduling Disciplines in Systems with Wait-dependent Service Times

In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling a nite number of jobs with stochastic wait-dependent processing times. We review the literature on this topic and present some new results. In particular, for certain processing time functions, we nd the policy which stochastically minimizes the makespan of the system.

Lean process improvement in outpatient healthcare systems

This paper considers the migration of lean process improvement methods from hospital systems to outpatient clinics. We review the strengths and weaknesses of a series of lean projects that were conducted in a community mental health center over a four-year period. We consider the evolution of the organization’s lean approaches and project results to identify areas of continuing research that ap...

Mitigation of Human Supervisory Control Wait Times through Automation Strategies

The application of network centric operations principles to human supervisory control (HSC) domains means that humans are increasingly being asked to manage multiple simultaneous HSC processes. However, increases in the number of available information sources, volume of information and operational tempo, all which place higher cognitive demands on operators, could become constraints limiting th...

Unacceptable emergency wait times.