Abstract

With an expanding number of healthcare clinics and a growing trend of consolidation, the possibility of a centralized location performing admission for multiple clinics has been presented as a possible method to save on operational costs. This centralized approach would cause significant changes in the admission process for decentralized clinics that have their own admission processes, and the effect on quality of care cannot be ignored when deciding which method to use. To determine the characteristics under which a centralized or decentralized admission system would be better, a discrete event simulation methodology is designed and utilized to compare the alternative approaches. Using the model and real-world data, a better understanding of the criteria that works best for each system can be gained and used as a guide for clinical organizations considering this choice. An experimental performance evaluation investigates factors including arrival rate per day, the mixture of patients for each clinic, the percentage of patients who have multiple appointments, the travel time to clinics, and the number of clinics in each system. Overall these experiments reveal that a centralized system can obtain the same or faster wait times than the decentralized system with less staffing in certain scenarios such as an increase in the number of clinics and number of multiple appointment patients. However, the centralized system with fewer staff can result in slightly higher maximum wait times than the decentralized model. A validation case study, supports the results and demonstrates the usefulness of the simulation methodology.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Clinics--Administration--Computer simulation; Decentralization in management--Computer simulation

Publication Date

6-5-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Industrial and Systems Engineering (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Industrial and Systems Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Michael E. Kuhl

Advisor/Committee Member

Nazibeh Azadeh Fard

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Plan Codes

ISEE-MS

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