Strategies for managing growth through Operation research and decision making Applied to hospitals

Hospitals are the critical units that need attention. Hence it is very important that operational efficiency of the hospitals should be taken care of.

Purpose of research is to manage queues in hospital through operation research and decision making strategies of simulation. As result of this, patients have to wait for less time in queues. Simulation is a decision support technique to conduct experiment with models that represent real-world systems of interest. For simulation, data is collected from real or original system.

About real system: Daga hospital is obstetrics and gynecology hospital situated in Nagpur. There is one operator (1 server) that registers patients and then guides them to the doctors. Large queue is observed at this operator.

Simulation of real system: -A hospital has 1 server. Arrival times of patients and Service time of the server is collected from hospital. Then histogram is plotted. From the histogram, data is identified with a particular distribution and then new arrival and service times are generated using random variate generator of that distribution. Using these values, simulation is conducted. Output of simulation is analyzed. If 1 server is overloaded, then suggestion to add another server is given.

Use of t-test: The hospital keeps a benchmark that waiting time should not be more than 2 minutes. After having 2 servers, waiting time in queue is calculated. Then t-test is applied to check whether the expected waiting time is achieved or not.

Use of replications in simulation: -If we simulate the same system many times then it is referred as replications. Forexample, if system is simulated 4 times with different input data then it will be 4 replications. Replications are used to increase the accuracy of the output. More replications mean more accurate output.

Major results Issues in hospital are resolved through operation research and decision making strategies of simulation. Output of simulation is analyzed and modifications in queuing are done.