A study of the CT scan area of a healthcare provider

Ancillary departments, which include radiology services, are among the important factors that affect the efficiency of patient care in a hospital. This paper presents results from a collaborative research effort with a healthcare provider that is in the process of implementing a digital image archiving system within its radiology services. The objective of this study was to identify the changes to the existing workflow at the CT scan area with the implementation of the digitized archiving system to maximize patient throughput and minimize report generation time. Process mapping was used to identify the initial flow of operations. A simulation model was then built to evaluate the different what-if scenarios that were expected to ´optimize´ the aforementioned response variables. Several key suggestions were also presented and validated using simulation. These include increasing the number of reading radiologists, re-allocation of CT Scan machine resources and the addition of a patient holding area.