Evaluating The Effeciency Of A Lab In The VA Hospital

The VA Hospital wanted to evaluate the efficiency of the GI lab, to prevent bottlenecks in the process, with a focus on increasing the scopes’ utilization rate by either increasing or decreasing the patients’ scheduled arrival rate OR increasing or decreasing the number of scopes.

Students used Simio to evaluate the current efficiency of the lab and assess what changes could be made to improve equipment utilization. They considered factors like patient arrival times, types of scopes, cleaning processes for each procedure and time in each step of the process.

After running various solutions, students showed that the best scenario included decreasing the number of scopes and increasing patient arrivals. While this does increase the patients’ time in the system, the increase is slight and the equipment is better utilized and allows for more patients to be seen while reducing equipment costs.