Title: The analysis of service station allocation in the hospital based on bottleneck model

Authors: F. Wu, T. Jia, S.L. Liu, J.Y. Qi

Addresses: School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xianning Road, Xi'an, P.R. China. ' School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xianning Road, Xi'an, P.R. China. ' School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xianning Road, Xi'an, P.R. China. ' School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, P.R. China

Abstract: The service station allocation, which directly decides the service level and operational cost, is very important to a hospital. It is necessary for the decision makers to evaluate and optimise the service systems. The structured process to solve service station allocation problems was depicted explicitly. Taking a hospital system as an example to illustrate the whole process, the major process includes constructing the GERT model of the system by process analysis, getting an initial solution through constantly identifying the bottleneck in the system and then eliminating them, evaluating the service level of the systems and identifying object that needs improvement, then optimising them constantly by simulation analysis, eventually a satisfying solution is achieved.

Keywords: GERT model; bottleneck modelling; China; sensibility analysis; simulation optimising; service system; theory of constraints; TOC; drum-buffer-rope; DBR; healthcare; outpatients department; hospital operations; service station allocation; hospitals.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTM.2009.025236

International Journal of Services Technology and Management, 2009 Vol.12 No.2, pp.231 - 251

Published online: 17 May 2009 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article