Designed to Fail: How Computer Simulation Can Detect Fundamental Flaws in Clinic Flow‪.‬

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Discrete-event simulation can be used as an effective tool for healthcare administrators to "test" various operational decisions. The recent growth in hospital outpatient volumes and a constrained financial environment make discrete-event simulation a cost-effective way to diagnose inefficiency and create and test strategies for improvement. This study shows how discrete-event simulation was used in an adult medicine clinic within a large, tertiary care, academic medical center. Simulation creation steps are discussed, including information gathering, process mapping, data collection, model creation, and results. Results of the simulation indicated that system bottlenecks were present in the medication administration and check-out steps of the clinic process. The simulation predicted that matching resources to excessive demand at appropriate times for these bottleneck steps would reduce patients' mean time in the system (i.e., visit time) from 124.3 (s.d. [+ or -] 65.7) minutes to 87.0 (s.d. [+ or -] 36.4) minutes.