Managing Patient Service in a Diagnostic Medical Facility

Managing Patient Service in a Diagnostic Medical Facility

Hospital diagnostic facilities, such as magnetic resonance imaging centers, typically provide service to several diverse patient groups: outpatients, who are scheduled in advance; inpatients, whose demands are generated randomly during the day; and emergency patients, who must be served as soon as possible. Our analysis focuses on two inter-related tasks: designing the outpatient appointment sc...

Managing waiting times in diagnostic medical imaging

OBJECTIVE This paper aims to analyse the variation in the delivery of diagnostic imaging services in order to suggest possible solutions for the reduction of waiting times, increase the quality of services and reduce financial costs. DESIGN This study provides a logic model to manage waiting times in a regional context. Waiting times measured per day were compared on the basis of the variabil...

Managing the violent addicted patient in the medical-surgical setting.

A Markov decision process approach to multi-category patient scheduling in a diagnostic facility

OBJECTIVES To develop a mathematical model for multi-category patient scheduling decisions in computed tomography (CT), and to investigate associated tradeoffs from economic and operational perspectives. METHODS We modeled this decision-problem as a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) with expected net CT revenue as the performance metric. The performance of optimal policies was comp...

Patient expectations from an emergency medical service.

BACKGROUND Patient expectation survey at the Emergency Medical Services can improve patient satisfaction. A need was established to conduct such a survey in order to recommend its use as a quality improvement tool. METHODS The study was conducted on patients visiting the Emergency Medical Services, Aga Khan University, Karachi. A questionnaire was used to collect information on the demographi...