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Chandler avatar image
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Chandler asked Chandler commented

How to give a doctor a preferred number of patients?

I want to know if there is a way to do this. Let's say that I want doctors to have no more than 6 patients at a time. They will not be acquired always by the patient, but while the patient is in the model, the doctor is their doctor.

If I have the right number of doctors, I could maybe get the results I need by using utilization as a way to decide which to acquire, but let's assume I have slightly fewer than I need.

I would want to assign randomly/by utilization/by some other factor until I reach the preferred maxiumum, at which point I only want to assign to that doctor if all of the doctors in the group have reached their maximum.

I would think that I would want to dynamically manage list order of doctors, perhaps? Or, that there is something built in that could handle this.We are wondering, but have not yet tested, what is the function of "Operator capacity"? Is that by chance a feature that would allow multiple patients to keep the doctor acquired during their entire stay, up to a maximum number?

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As usual, I'm just looking for the right tool to figure it out. I read a few posts from a while back mentioning global processes but I'm not certain that's the right fit here.

FlexSim 23.1.1
healthcareresources
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Matthew Gillespie avatar image
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Matthew Gillespie answered Chandler commented

Here's an example using the Filter By field on the Staff resource. PatientsPerDoctor.fsm

First I added a NumPatients field to the Staff list.

1692204145919.png

Then I reference Num Patients in the Sort By and Filter By fields. The model has a Model Parameter called PatientsPerDoctor where you can change how many patients each doctor can have at a time. (We need the curly braces around the parameter so that the query executes that part as FlexScript to turn it into a number)

1692204020608.png

In the patient flow the patient adds themselves to the MD's Patients array label when it first acquires the MD, and then removes themselves from that label when they leave.


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Julie Weller avatar image
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Julie Weller answered Julie Weller commented

Hi @Chandler! I think there are probably a lot of ways to do that. One would be by adding a label to the doctor, something like this:

1692130711137.png

Then, when that doctor is acquired the first time increment that label. On the patient put a similar label that references the doctor. When they leave the system, access the doctor label on the patient and decrement the label on the doctor.

You could have a loop in process flow that checks if all the doctors are full and then assigns patients randomly or based on who has the least.

A less scale-able option would be to push the patients to a list for each doctors and then check how many values are on that list and then pull them off the list just before they exit.

If you want more help, you could toggle this post to private and post a model or post a sample model and we can take a closer look at helping you implement that! Someone else might have some ideas too :)


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