Diagnosing patient waiting times in hospitals Seminar

This seminar will discuss a new approach to diagnosing throughput time performance in hospitals. Reducing patient throughput times, in terms of length of stay and admission time, is an important objective for many hospitals. However, we claim that appropriate instruments to determine specific causes of delays are lacking. The instruments presented in this seminar elaborate on an approach to diagnosing the delays of customer orders in high-variety manufacturing environments. Quantitative patient progress data from hospital information systems is analysed by techniques based on input/output modelling. A time-phased representation is applied, since most patient flows will reveal dynamic patterns. Using this representation, we could point out how e.g. excessive waiting times in an emergency care unit resulted from an insufficient capacity response to increasing patient inflow rates at early stages of the day. The same approach has been studied for diagnosing waiting times in care pathways, surgery waiting times and times to provide lab results.