The Marginal Utility of Medical Resources in Clinics with Deterministic Patient Arrivals: A Simulation Study

In recent years, dramatic increase in the cost of health care has compelled practitioners to draw a balance between improving efficiency and reducing costs. A discrete-event simulation model has been constructed to assist a typical two-physician family practice healthcare clinic in evaluating potential resource allocations to improve operating efficiencies and patient satisfaction. A performance measure, constructed on a monetary scale (dollars/day), strives to simultaneously satisfy the conflicts of patients, medical staff, and clinic owners by capturing system dynamics. Utility of medical resources is studied from the point of view of a local two-physician nephrology clinic in the light of resource flexibility, resource scheduling, and resource allocation to arrive at an ‘efficient utility frontier’, a reflection of patient satisfaction.