Title: Patient waiting time analysis in a multi-specialty ophthalmic outpatient clinic using data analysis and discrete event simulation

Authors: Shanmugam Prasanna Venkatesan; Lalwani Saurabh; Naveen Thomas; Sumanta Roy

Addresses: Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: The demand for outpatient services is rapidly growing, resulting in multifaceted challenges due to capacity limitations. This research aims to analyse the patient waiting time in a multi-specialty ophthalmic outpatient clinic using data analysis and discrete event simulation (DES). The patient arrivals, the duration for pre-consultation and post-consultation services are highly uncertain. At first, a linear regression analysis is performed using electronic health record (EHR) log data, and the significant factors that affect patient waiting time are found. Further, a discrete event simulation model of the outpatient clinic is built using FlexSim Healthcare software (5.3) and validated. Improvement scenarios, namely: 1) adding resources; 2) introducing fixed interval appointment scheduling; 3) combining scenarios 1 and 2, are proposed for reducing the patient waiting time and evaluated. From the simulation results, it is inferred that scenario 3 reduces the average waiting time of the patients to 12.45 minutes from 38.37 minutes.

Keywords: healthcare simulation; outpatient clinic; ophthalmology; data analysis; regression; waiting time.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2023.134520

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2023 Vol.20 No.1, pp.10 - 20

Received: 01 Dec 2022
Accepted: 06 Apr 2023
Published online: 26 Oct 2023 *