Wit With The Needs: A Case Study

Cindy, I liked how you wrote out the workflow to show how the patient moves within the PATA department during their appointment. The California Healthcare Foundation (2011) recommends process mapping, a visual representation of all the steps in a workflow, as a tool to help with detecting where processes intersect and where inefficiencies occur. Additionally, the movement of the patient could also have been diagramed out on the floor plan provided by McCarty, Gallien, and Levi (2012) to illustrate the inefficiencies of the patient as they moved around the clinic. You also listed the average times a patient spent with each staff member which helps to simplify and provide a visual of the amount of time a patient spends with a provider versus waiting. …show more content…
I agree with your suggestion to implement a care team, with each patient assigned a lab tech, nurse, and anesthesiologist as I had the same thought. One of the issues with PATA’s current state is that they take patient based on their arrival time, not their appointment time, and then people take breaks if they aren’t busy, so it could potentially cause issues with the next assigned person when those individuals might already be with a patient or unavailable (McCarty et al, 2012). However, moving to this model would help to restructure this process since PATA would be moving patients through based on the assigned group rather than first to arrive, improving the process from check in through the end of the appointment. This would also make it easier to schedule breaks, preventing the backups at lunch