EVALUATING HOSPITAL PHARMACY STAFFING AND WORK SCHEDULING USING SIMULATION

1
EVALUATING HOSPITAL PHARMACY STAFFINGAND WORK
SCHEDULING USING SIMULATION

• Charles W. Spry
• Mark A. Lawley
• School of Industrial Engineering
• Purdue University
• West Lafayette, I N 47907, U.S.A.

Presented by Anderson John, Midwestern State
University
2
Overview

• Introduction
• Objective
• Inspection of the Actual System
• Approach
• Simulation Output
• Conclusion

3
Introduction

• Dilemma
• The cost of drugs and healthcare has increased
  over the years.
• 1993 to 2000 drug costs as a percentage of total
  healthcare cost doubled
• There is currently a shortage of licensed
  pharmacists

4
Introduction

• Why Simulate?
• to find the best utilization of pharmacy staff
• To save money
• To improve healthcare delivery

5
Introduction

• BroMenn Regional Medical Center (BMRC)
• Non-profit
• 224 bed
• Operating in Normal Illinois
• 24 hour inpatient pharmacy

6
Objective

• The goal is to help BroMenn Regional Medical
  Center offset
• High healthcare costs
• Insufficient qualified pharmacists

7
Inspection of the Actual System

• The actual system
• BMRC In-patient pharmacy
• Prescription medication orders for patients
  admitted
• A goal of 120 minutes to process a prescription
  order and have it delivered
• At least 1 pharmacist 24 hours per day

8
Inspection of the Actual System

• Classification of orders
• Med
• IV
• SureMed
• Each can have a priority status of Normal or Stat
  (higher priority)
• Orders of the same priority are FIFO

9
Approach

• Data Collection
• Order type distribution
• Inter-arrival distribution
• Processing times
• Phone call data

10
Approach

• Data Collection

11
Approach

• The Model
• Modeling Software AutoMod 11.1
• Entities
• Processes
• Resources (pharmacy staff)
• Queues
• Loads (prescription orders, dummy loads)
• Rx orders Attributes
• Arrival time, Type (Med/IV), Priority

12
Approach

• The Model
• Each process is triggered by an arriving load
• Loads attributes are assigned at arrival to the
  system
• The load goes through some operations
• Sent to the next process

13
Approach

• One process responsible for keeping the hour of
  the day
• One process brings up and takes down resources
  based on the staff schedule
• Other Processes SureMed, Filling cart

14
Approach

• The variables of the model are altered to
  evaluate options of pharmacy management
• Staffing Plans
• Current
• Add 8hrs to an IV tech in the evening
• Add an additional technician in the evening

15
Simulation Output

• Performance measurement
• Average time an order spends in system
• Charts were created to aid management in
  interpreting results
• Data collected was based on a typical week
• Model was ran for an order volume of 150 of the
  week that was collected

16
Simulation Output
17
Conclusion

• BroMenn pharmacy management is using the results
  to help justify changing their operational policy
• Forthcoming for the project
• To create a simulation model robust enough to be
  used by any hospital in-patient pharmacy

18
Questions?
19
References

• Spry, Charles, Mark A. Lawley. EVALUATING
  HOSPITAL PHARMACY STAFFING AND WORK SCHEDULING
  USING SIMULATION. informs-cs.org. 24 Jan. 2007
  lthttp//www.informs-cs.org/wsc05paper
  s/prog05.htmlBHCgt

20

• Thank You!