Waiting time analysis of patient flow in an outpatient OB/GYN clinic - A simulation approach

In the health care industry, a pressing issue is the need to assess and analyze care services in order to ensure efficient and quality care. For outpatient clinics, patient wait time is an important performance measure in helping to determine service quality. The Community Women's Clinic (CWC) or UAMS Women's Clinic, associated with the University of Arkansas for Medical Science (UAMS), is a practice dedicated to providing outpatient obstetrics care. The purpose of this study is to develop a simulation model of the clinic and run scenarios to help us make predictions regarding changes to the clinic operations on performance, such as patient wait times. Without the availability of fitted service distributions, the distributions assumed and utilized over the course of this study were triangular, which allows the service time to take any of three values, a minimum, a mode, or a maximum. Several "what-if" scenarios were run with the purpose of finding any potential "bottlenecks" for patient wait times with the goal to eliminate these potential obstacles to lower patient wait time. From these scenarios, it was determined that increasing the number of nurses staffing the three clinic pods lowered patient wait times but had no effect on reducing the total time in the exam rooms or the total time spent in the clinic by a patient. A second stage of analysis showed that increasing the number of APNs decreased the time patients wait in the exam room for a doctor, etc. This consequently reduced the total time spent in the exam room as well as reduced total time spent in the clinic.