How do I get a Nurse to do a later consult instead of taking a new patient?

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Tom R6 asked Jun 7, '22 Tom R6 commented Jun 16, '22

How do I get a Nurse to do a later consult instead of taking a new patient?

Hello! I am working on a Emergency Department model, where I am trying to model out patients coming in, getting escorted by a nurse to a bed and getting some initial bloodwork, and then having the option of getting an EKG. At that point, I am releasing the nurse(staff) resource. The patient then has the option of getting a variety of treatments based on their label, or going straight to the consult with Physician step, which is the last step before they leave. For the consult with physician step, the same nurse who escorted to the patient to their bed initially and took their labs needs to be there again. To do this, I have ghosted the nurse from earlier, and reacquired it for the last step.. I'm trying to make the model so that when their is a decision for the nurse on whether to attend the last patient consult, or to escort a new patient, they always choose to do the consult. I'm trying to set this up based on priority scores. The priority for the last "acquire nurse" step right before the consult is a 200, while the priority score for the initial "acquire nurse" is 90, the the last one should trump it, but its not working right now. I've attached my model, so if anyone could go in and take a look it would be much appreciated, thank you!

KDH_autosave.fsm

Software Version:

FlexSim 22.0.2

process flow preemption with priority

kdh-autosave.fsm (1.1 MiB)

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Jeanette F ♦♦ commented · Jun 10, 2022 at 07:01 PM

Hi @Tom R6, was Matthew Gillespie's answer helpful? If so, please click the "Accept" button at the bottom of their answer. Or if you still have questions, add a comment and we'll continue the conversation.

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Answer 1 · 2022-06-07T21:15:41Z

Matthew Gillespie answered Jun 7, '22 Tom R6 commented Jun 16, '22

It's not working as you expected because you set the Doctor's Priority to 200, no the ghosted Nurse resource. Also, since you're referring back to the original Nurse resource to acquire the same nurse as before (using the ghost resource) you can only set the Priority on the original resource. However, we can still update this Priority value later in the flow. One way to do this is to store the Priority value on a label and then update that label value. I added a NursePriority label to the token at the start of the flow and set its value to 150. We then pass this into the original Nurse resource:

Then before acquiring the nurse again at the end we increase the NursePriority value:

Here's your updated model:

kdh-autosave_1.fsm

You'll notice I changed your priority values from 90 and 200 to 150 and 160. This is because from your description you just want the second acquire to take priority over the first, not that you want the second to preempt the first. Since 160 is higher than 150, when the nurse becomes available they'll choose to do the 160 task before starting the 150 task. With your old values, however, the second request is two preemption tiers above the first. So as soon as a patient needs the nurse for the consult they'll stop any other lower tier tasks they are currently doing and immediately run over to do the consult.

1654636200937.png (10.8 KiB)

1654636265025.png (17.6 KiB)

kdh-autosave-1.fsm (1.1 MiB)

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Tom R6 commented · Jun 15, 2022 at 07:27 PM

Hi Matthew, thank you so much for the help! This works great now!

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