Improving productivity and quality of service in internal medicine clinics through simulation

This paper presents a case study in which discrete event simulation is used to study, analyze and enhance the productivity and quality of service in an internal medicine clinic in a local hospital in Jordan. The simulation models all the intricate details of the daily activities inside the clinic from patient reception and registration, to preliminary nurse checkups as well as doctors' schedules and workloads. Actual data are collected representing patient inter-arrival times, processing times and number of employees which are used as inputs to the model. Additionally, data representing queue waiting times, number of patients in queues and total patient service times were also collected for validation purposes. Results show the weaknesses and trouble regions in the current system and key performance indicators are optimized to enhance the performance of the clinic. The study can be expanded to the whole medical sector in Jordan and can help understand and improve its shortcomings as a whole.