The Importance of Layout Organization in Hospital Management Efficiency and A Model Study

Nowadays, every day more and more people increasingly demand to receive healthcare services from healthcare organizations, so hospitals cover physically large areas and due to the increasing number of expertise more laboratory units and polyclinics are needed to serve. Although hospitals have gained great advances qualitatively, transportation of patients to units in hospitals has started to build large and unexpected problems and dense crowds in hospitals have made this situation a chronic problem. In the past, the rate of referral of the patients to the diagnostic units after the examination was not very high, however, many of the diagnostic examinations today are supported by the results obtained from the diagnostic units. Likewise, the number of consultation requests between polyclinics has increased, and transportation and interaction among the units has become frequent among the health institutions. This problem has led hospital managers to tmake plans about hospital layout problems especially on radiology, laboratory units and polyclinics locations. In this study, in order to solve transportation problems in hospitals by creating the most appropriate hospital layouts and to minimize problems we implemented a software based on ant colony algorithm to create the best layout of the hospital. According to the results of the study, in the sample model, 62% benefit was gained from the circulation of outpatient clinics, 78% benefit was gained from the outpatient circulation in the consultation requests and 23% and 53% benefit was gained in the transportation of the patients sent to the laboratories and radiology departments respectively. The model proposal developed within the scope of the study, could be a guide for positioning policlinics, laboratories and radiology units of medical institutions, which have a large number of specialized polyclinics and laboratories, which are spatially very large and visited by thousands of patients every day. The system developed in the study can be easily implemented in healthcare institutions that have different working arrangements or different physical designs because it receives as parameters of the preffered sizes of each unit, policlinic consultation numbers and number of test requests from polyclinics to the laboratory and radiology departments.