A CASE STUDY FOR PATIENT WORKLOAD ANALYSIS OF AN OUTPATIENT CLINIC.

A healthcare clinic, like other service-based businesses, requires effective personnel resource planning to achieve its objectives. In addition to other aims, the plan serves two purposes. First, it communicates what the roles and responsibilities are for the team members, and second, it can serve to evaluate areas for possible improvement. This paper reports on a study that analyzes a tactical personnel resource schedule plan, which is called ‘game plan’ by clinic team, for a general internal medicine outpatient clinic. The game plan is distributed every morning to the clinic’s healthcare providers and staff to provide them with a better understanding of the schedule, workload, responsibilities, contact information, and absentees and coverage for the day. This study was undertaken to develop to identify areas for possible improvements. Three months of daily game plans were analyzed. The analysis included planned patient throughput per physician, for each of the clinic’s four ‘Pods’, and differences in physician workload for each day of the week. Significant differences were noted in the throughput for the individual physicians, between the four Pods, and during different days of the week. Some of the Pods and physicians had significant variances in throughput. Indepth analysis indicated that how the scheduling is performed and individual physician approach to patient care are the main causes for existing variances. The paper concludes by noting areas for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]