Engineering efficiency in medicine
By Dawn Hibbard
A Senior Design Project turned into just what the doctor ordered for four Industrial Engineering (IE) majors in Dr. Matthew Sanders’ fall 2008 capstone class at Kettering.
Dr. Tower said he became aware of the capstone class through the IT Department at Beaumont Hospital. “Through my administrative position at William Beaumont Hospital-Troy as the medical director of Quality and Patient Safety, I have had significant exposure to the engineering profession working in the medical field in a number of areas,” said Tower. “I was quite confident at the onset of the project that we would learn valuable information,” he added.
“Our assignment was to look at streamlining processes and improve operations without sacrificing quality of patient care,” said John LaRose, an IE major from Birch Run, Mich.
Their goals were to increase patient value-added time with the doctors; increase patient throughput by reducing delays and waiting time for patients; and improve access and efficiency of clinical office operations.
To address the issue of increasing patient value-added time, the group followed patient flow through the office, with times associated with every movement of the patient recorded, creating a time study. This gave the group a visual representation of when the physician was and was not adding value to the patient visit. The students considered waiting to be non-value added time, whether in the waiting room or in the examination room.
To increase patient throughput by reducing delays and waiting time for patients, LaRose and his team, including Nick Latiano of Niles, Ohio, Nick Maschino of Davison, Mich., and Cidney McGee of Detroit, utilized time study data to analyze how long the individual medical assistants and doctors spent with each patient in the exam room.
Tower said that the standard research methodology employed by the students was good. “It was rather transparent to the office and non-interrupting,” he added.
Through their research, the students found there was a scheduling bottleneck in the process caused by usage of four examination rooms. They recommended that instead of scheduling patients at certain times, the office should schedule patients to a specific exam room.
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