Schedule for MDs and separate patient stream

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Vinayak N2 asked Jun 17, '21 Vinayak N2 commented Jul 6, '21

Schedule for MDs and separate patient stream

Hi Team,
There are two things I want to implement in my model and I'm not sure what is the best way to go about it. Could you give me some direction?

1) I have two MDs (MD1 and MD2) and I want to give them two separate working schedules (example MD1 = Monday and Tuesday 8 AM to 5 PM, MD2 = Tuesday and Friday 9 AM to 6 PM)

2) I want to create separate patient streams for these two MDs who show up for appointments of variable duration only when the MD is available.

@Matthew Gillespie

Software Version:

FlexSim 21.1.2

healthcare flexsim 21.1.2

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test.fsm (48.9 KiB)

Answer 1 · 2021-06-18T22:08:40Z

Eric M answered Jun 18, '21 Vinayak N2 commented Jul 6, '21

Hi @Vinayak N2, for the first question, you will want to create a time table for each doctor. There's a tutorial that goes over how it works and how to set it up.

For the second question, you can create two different patient flows, one for each doctor. Then you can set the schedule of the sources to create tokens during the times you know the doctor is working. The variability in time is something you can control in the "Process" activity in process flow.

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Vinayak N2 commented · Jun 20, 2021 at 11:57 PM

test-em.fsm

Thanks Eric! Great ideas!

For the first question, I was able to create the 'Time tables'. Thanks for the tutorial.

For the second question, I'm trying to model it from a capacity allocation point of view.

For example, for MD1's schedule below, for Tuesday, I want to allocate patients to the schedule only for 3 hours between 9 to 12. It could be 3 patients taking 1 hour each or 6 patients taking 0.5 hours each. I can assign the duration of appointment using a distribution via the process time field. But is there any way to model the arrivals based on the time table?

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Eric M Vinayak N2 commented · Jun 21, 2021 at 05:39 PM

I don't know of a way to directly change the arrivals based on a time table. You can always just make the arrivals schedule follow the same hours as the time table for the doctor. The other option I can think of is to include a decide activity before the patient is created to see if the doctor is working or not. If they are off schedule, the token goes to a sink. If they are on schedule, the token proceeds to create a patient. That's not directly manipulating the arrivals, but it is filtering them out when the doctor is not working. I did this for MD1 so you can see how it might work.

test-em.fsm

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Vinayak N2 Eric M commented · Jun 22, 2021 at 05:32 AM

Thanks Eric, that's a great idea too, but I thought of another direction that I think is more representative of how I want my model to behave.

I want to create a list with number of slots (which varies based on the weekday) available for patients to book from. And patients should be able to book slots (1 slot or 2 slots based on a percentage) if they are available in the list and arrive at the clinic until the number of slots for the day are completely booked. If no slots are available, then they should book slots on the next day's list of slots.

A) I created a global table called 'Slotsperweekday' to create slots into the list. But I am not able to push the number of slots to the list based on the Day of the model run time. Can you help me with that?

B) I then went to create an arrival source that creates the demand per day based on a distribution and pulls these from the list and processes. I'm struggling with choosing an appropriate source object to do this. And if the daily demand exceeds the number of slots available, I want the demand (or patient) to carry over to the next day. Any ideas or examples with regard to this would be super helpful. test3.fsm

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