In the first module you practiced writing a policy. In this module your project will focus on management.

We all have the experience of waiting in line and waiting time is among the most common complaints from patients. In this project you are to analyze a waiting time problem and propose ways to decrease the wait time. Even if you dont work in any of the healthcare situations, you have waited in lines and might have thought of a better way to do it while you waited impatiently.

There is a great deal of literature concerning wait-times and has had much mathematical modeling. I attach a copy of Supplement C on Waiting Lines from Krajewski, Ritzman, & Malhotra Operations Management, 9^th. Ed, Prentice Hall, 2010. This is an introduction to the problem of wait-lines. I copied this from the textbook and I am sorry that it is a little difficult to read. (You are not expected to analyze the problem mathematically (although you can if you wish and are capable.)

Choose one of the following problems for your paper:

1. Waiting times in a doctors office.

2. The problem of getting a patient from the floor/ER/ambulatory surgery to the operating room.

3. Waiting time in the emergency room for one of the types of problems

a. An urgent problem

b. A non-urgent problem

4. Waiting for an imaging procedure (x-ray, ultrasound, CT scan). Assume that the patient is in the facility.

Some clues and suggestions:

1. Increasing staff may not be the only fix.

2. Think about the Disney experience with lines

3. Changing patients expectations may change their attitudes. (Some problems are actually intractable, and some waiting is inevitable).

In writing your paper consider the following:

1. Who are the stakeholders in the option you selected, and why? What are the potential differing interests among those stakeholders?
2. What information or data do you need to assess the problem? How might you go about obtaining that information and data?
3. What analytical processes and tools would be of help in defining the problem and generating solutions?
4. What strategies and steps would you take to implement a solution? Why do you think it will be successful?
5. How will you evaluate whether your solution is working?