Medical - Exam Room Distribution

When the new Ambulatory Care Building opens next March, we'll need a new system for room distribution. I'm playing with some ideas and here's one of them. It's a lot of thinking outloud, so bear with me:

All Rooms are interchangeable.

JIT principles applied to room reservations. That is, no queue, no keeping rooms in reserve. They are used as they are needed, doing today’s work today, now’s work now.

Air traffic control model: One giant reader board with every exam room labeled. This board is in real time, like air traffic control. A patient comes in, that patient is assigned a room, as near as possible to the conference room of the service they are here to see. It wouldn’t do to assign exam rooms completely randomly. Providers would be wasting too much time walking across the medical center in search of the exam rooms.

At the same time, if a service needed an exam room that was further away, they would have access to it. If rooms on one side were un (or under) used, that information would be transparent.

With this metaphor, patients are airplanes, exam rooms are landing strips, and services are terminals.

I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, but it would require a person to run the operation during business hours. Perhaps a modified greeter?

Strategically, it makes sense. It leaves the key decisions until the maximum information is available. It adjusts throughout the day, it allows for the most flexibility.

Rooms could be assigned based on zone preference. A patient would be assigned to the zone closest to the service; a certain amount of operator judgment would be required to maximize this system.

Option 1: patient registers, goes to waiting area.
Registrar notifies MA of arrival
MA gets family, does vitals, takes family to exam room.
MA finishes charting, hands off to provider.

Option 2: patient registers, is sent (or led) directly to exam room. (restaurant numbers?)
Registrar notifies MA of arrival
MA gets family from exam room, does vitals, takes or sends back to exam room..
MA finishes charting, hands off to provider.

What if the only available room is far, then later, other rooms open? How would we handle lift and shifts?

I want to get rid of the room assignment grid. Instead, we’d have the active, real time grid, matched with expected volumes based on how many providers are scheduled.

Model 1 – the Patient Traffic Controller greets the family, does the registration, and assigns the room, all at the same time.

Model 2 – Patient Traffic Controller assigns the rooms from behind the scenes, based on piped in and pre-prepared data.