Can you make staff pick up a patient based on the appointment schedule?

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Vosse SDL asked May 15, '17 Matthew Gillespie commented May 16, '17

Can you make staff pick up a patient based on the appointment schedule?

Hi,

I am currently simulating a hospital where patients arrive based on an appointment schedule. However, the doctors will simply pick up the patients as soon as the previous patient has left, in stead of waiting till the time of the appointment. I want the patient to leave the waiting room as soon as its the time of the appointment and as soon as the assigned doctor is available.

Thank you,

Tessa

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staff waiting room pickup appointments

Answer 1 · 2017-05-15T19:45:56Z

Matthew Gillespie answered May 15, '17 Matthew Gillespie commented May 16, '17

HC is driven primarily by activities on the patient. So it's really up to the patient to decide when they want to start the activity that asks the doctor to come get them. The easiest way to do this is to just use the Appointments schedule on the Arrivals object such that patients don't arrive until their appointment time.

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Vosse SDL commented · May 16, 2017 at 07:31 AM

Okay, but that means that the patients don't have to wait at all as in real situations, and that is actually what I'm trying to simulate. Do you have any suggestions?

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Matthew Gillespie ♦♦ Vosse SDL commented · May 16, 2017 at 05:05 PM

Let's assume the patient shows up 15 minutes before their scheduled appointment like they were told to. If the doctor is not currently busy, wouldn't they, in real life, immediately see to the patient? If however, the doctor is busy, the patient will need to wait for the doctor to finish seeing the other patient or finish their break.

Basically, from the patient's perspective, as soon as they arrive they are ready to start their appointment and are waiting on the doctor to be ready. If the patient waits in the waiting room for a certain time on average in real life, then you shouldn't force the patient to wait that long in the model. You should make sure the doctors are busy enough in the model that they cause the appropriate amount of wait times for the patients waiting on them. If you force the patients to always wait a set amount of time then your model is no good for experimenting with. You can't look at how patient wait times are affected by shift schedules, adding more doctors, adding more patient appointments, etc.

That said, if you insist on enforcing the appointment times you could add an Activity Start Condition to the activity that only lets the activity start if the time is after the specified start time. You would probably want to have the condition rechecked every so often until the condition is true.

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