Mocarzel, Shelton, Uyan, Pérez, Jimenez, and DePagter MODELING AND SIMULATION OF PATIENT ADMISSION SERVICES IN A MULTI- SPECIALTY OUTPATIENT CLINIC Bruno Mocarzel David Shelton Berkcan Uyan Eduardo Pérez Jesus A. Jimenez Lenore DePagter Ingram School of Engineering Texas State University 601 University Drive Live Oak Health Partners 1340 Wonder World Drive San Marcos, TX 78666, USA San Marcos, TX 78666, USA ABSTRACT Tactical planning of resources in healthcare clinics concerns elective patient admission planning and the intermediate term allocation of resource capacities. Its main objectives are to achieve equitable access for patients, to serve the strategically agreed number of patients, and to use resources efficiently. In this pa- per, we describe a simulation model for an outpatient healthcare clinic facing multiple issues related to patient admission and resource workflow. The main problems identified at the clinic are: 1) phones are not answered promptly and 2) patients experience long wait time to check in and check out. The simula- tion model focuses on the front desk operations. We investigate different resource allocation policies and report on computational results based on a real clinic, historical data, and both patient and management performance measures. 1 INTRODUCTION Long wait times are the major reason for patient service dissatisfaction in healthcare outpatient clinics. A typical patient usually is required to go through a sequence of activities before seeing a physician and most of these activities are performed at the clinic’s front desk. For example, some clinics require patients to call in advance to schedule appointments with the physicians. In addition, at the time of the appoint- ment, patients are required to check-in, fill out the requested documentation, and visit with a nurse prior to seeing the physician. Furthermore, patients return to the clinic’s front desk after seeing their physician in order to complete the check-out process. Patients expect short waiting times resulting from these activi- ties; otherwise, there will be patient dissatisfaction and inadequate utilization of resources that will im- pact the clinic’s quality of service. The increase in healthcare costs on local and national stages has propelled the need to reduce costs and improve the efficiency in outpatient services. Over the years, topics related to reducing patient wait- ing times have received a lot of attention amongst researchers and practitioners. Most of the research done has a focus in improving the clinic scheduling system, but these studies exclude the details regarding the clinic’s front desk patient admission processes. More specifically, the clinic is modeled as single-stage servers without processes such as patient calls management, patient check-in and check-out, and docu- mentation. Since physicians are expensive resources and are available for limited time periods, it is criti-