Emergency room use at “SAVE-ME!” Hospital peaks on Saturday
nights during the period from 7:00pm to 2:00am.Historically, the
hospital has provided 4 examining rooms for nonemergency cases and
2 examining rooms for emergency cases during that period.
Nonemergency patients are examined on a first-come, first-served
basis, and emergency cases are treated on a most-serious,
first-served basis, after a triage nurse has screened all cases.
The data on patient arrival pattern were collected on Saturday
nights. During a total of 100 hours, there were 900 nonemergency
and 150 emergency patients came to the ER during the peak time. The
average service time was found to be 30 minutes per nonemergency
and 75 minutes per emergency patient. An area competitor hospital
recently announced discontinuation of emergency services.
“SAVE-ME!” Hospital estimates that the current arrival patterns
during the 7:00pm to 2:00am period would increase by one-third for
nonemergency cases and would double for emergency cases. Thus,
“SAVE-ME!” Hospital decided to add 3 additional examining rooms for
nonemergency cases and 2 additional rooms for emergency cases. You
are asked by the operation manager to:
1) Use queueing model to analyze both the emergency and the
nonemergency capaticy and performances measures taking into the
consideration the discontinuation of the evergency services of the
area competitor;
2) Based on the costs information provided by the
finance/accounting department (shown below) to determine the
overall cost of operations for nonemergency and for emergency
patients;
3) Determine if more additional examining rooms should be added
to reduce the congestion and waiting time, as well as the overall
cost of operations for nonemergency and for emergency patients. If
so, how many more additioanl examining rooms would you suggest be
added for noneEmergency and Emergency cases and how much total cost
can it be reduced if your suggested additional examining rooms are
added.
