Evaluating the impact of human resource management on the patient flow at an outpatient orthopedic clinic

ABSTRACT

This paper treats the problem of patient flow in an outpatient orthopedic clinic. A detailed description of the system and the main pathways followed by patients during their care process are provided. In fact, analyzing the patient flow has served to improve healthcare delivery in this clinic by identifying the sources of delay which are mainly related to inefficient human resources management. Therefore, a list of improvement scenarios is proposed and evaluated using discrete event simulation model. The proposed changes have resulted in a great improvement in terms of minimizing the patient waiting time (WT) and total length of stay (LOS). Furthermore, we proposed a multiple linear regression model that helped us to analyze the relationship between the performance-related factors (WT and LOS) and the influencing variables related to patient flows. Indeed, these models enable managers to plan reorganization of this outpatient clinical and adopt the suitable strategies for each type of pathway.

KEYWORDS:

• Patient flow
• pathway
• waiting time
• length of stay
• discrete event simulation
• multiple linear regression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).