Improving patient flow at a cardiology outpatient clinic

The outpatient cardiology department at a local hospital provides cardiac care to a large number of patients in the Erie area. The department contains a catheterization laboratory, electrophysiology laboratory, and trans-esophageal echocardiogram laboratory. The patients that undergo procedures within these labs have a number of preoperative procedures that can be bypassed with prior testing and evaluation. Currently, the department is suffering from excessive waiting times and long length of stay (LOS). Excessive waiting times and long LOS lead to significant costs for the hospital in the form of overtime for its medical staff. In addition, this result in patients as well as staff dissatisfaction. This paper presents a simulation study of the cardiology department to test different scheduling alternatives. The simulation model was developed in Simio®. Multiple scheduling alternatives were tested. The results show that spreading the arrivals of the patients over longer period would decrease the LOS experienced by the patients. The average waiting time for all patients was not practically affected by the changes.