Marion Health Clinic sees patients on a walk-in basis only. On average, 10 patients per hour enter the clinic. All patients register at the registration window with a registration clerk (RC), which takes 3 minutes.
After registration, but before being seen by a nurse practitioner (NP), the registration records clerk (RRC) pulls the patient's records from the records room, which takes 6 minutes.
At his or her turn, each patient then sees a NP, who checks weight, temperature, and blood pressure. This work activity takes 5 minutes.
The NP determines if the patient must see a doctor (MD) or can be handled by a Physician's Assistant (PA). There is one MD, one PA, one NP, one RRC, one BC, and one RC in the system at the current time.
The NP sends 40 percent of the patients to the PA and 60 percent to the MD. The PA takes on average 6 minutes per patient whereas the MD takes 15 minutes.
After the patient sees the PA and/or MD, the patient pays the bill or processes insurance information with the billing clerk (BC), which takes 5 minutes per patient. Then the patient exits the process.
Throughput time is given in the problem. The throughput/service rate per hour would be 60 minutes/3 minutes = 20 patients per hour. The utilization rate is the number of patients walking in per hour which is given at 10 divided by the service rate per hour of 20. 10/20 = .5 or 50% which means that for the registration process, the registration clerk (RC) is operating at 50% utilization or the RC is only busy half of the time each hour.
Complete the schedule. One difference will be for the physician assistant, who only sees 40% of the patients (40%*10 = 4 patients per hour) and the medical doctor who sees the remaining 60% of the patients (60% * 10 = 6 patients per hour).
Complete this schedule.