Simulating a Hospital Preadmission Testing Center to Improve Patient Service

Healthcare spending is one of the biggest financial challenges of the United States. Patients, healthcare providers, and government agencies are increasingly becoming more conscious about cost of care and quality of care. As a result, using analytics to improve patient care is getting a lot of attention. In this chapter, we briefly review the use of analytics in healthcare and provide an example to improve patient service in a preadmission testing center (PATC). A PATC is a hospital unit that serves pre-operative patients to get them ready for surgery in the Operating Room (OR) on the surgery date. The activities include gathering patient information and performing procedure-specific tests. Patients can either walk-in to PATC or schedule an appointment in advance. We explain the operations of a PATC and efforts to reduce patient waiting time. Based on the patient data collected, we analyzed the system using a simulation model.