Simulation Modeling and Analysis of a Multi-resource Medical Clinic

Clinic of University of Louisville is a relatively new medical clinic which attempts to stem the epidemic of childhood obesity. The main problem addressed by this research is the no show rate (nearly 50%) of the clinic. There are two goals in this project. One is to increase the staff utilization; the other is to decrease the waiting time. We study two potential methods to solve this problem. One involves using multiple resources for every visit; the other involves overbooking the patients. One simulation model is an overbooking model in which the interarrival times are controlled for each type of patients. By increasing arrival rate of patients, the waiting time, the total number of served patients and the utilization of staff are increased. We need to trade off in order to choose the best arrival rate for the clinic. The second model involves using multiple resources for every visit. We also change the interarrival time for patients in order to estimate the best values for these inputs.