Simulation modeling to optimize healthcare delivery in an outpatient clinic

This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of an Internal Medicine outpatient clinic practice setting by applying discrete event simulation (DES) modeling. Growing demands on outpatient clinics require greater emphasis on enhancing performance and optimizing resource utilization. Therefore, a data collection plan was designed to capture total patient visit time; including waiting, clinical care, and clinical administrative time. The collected data was fed into a DES model. The model was validated through a statistical comparison with the performance of the real system. Various improvement alternatives were then proposed and investigated through the DES model, such as altering resource allocation, patient rooming and prioritization, and patient volume. For each scenario, key performance indicators of the system, resource utilization metrics, capacity metrics and turnaround time metrics were traced. Findings indicated that targeted improvement scenarios could be applied with 27.5%, 54.8% and 20% enhancement in utilization, capacity and turnaround time respectively.