scholarly journals Optimize Outpatient Pharmacy Service Process: Shorten Waiting Time and Improve Patient Satisfaction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenqiong He ◽  
Qian Xu ◽  
Jiayong Yang ◽  
Feng Liu

Abstract Background: To provide scientific decision-making basis for managers to improve management methods, so about make outpatient pharmacy service flow smoother and more efficient, shorten the waiting time for patients to take medicine and improve patient satisfaction.Methods: Based on the concept of BI, the existing data onto outpatient pharmacy in our hospital were analyzed in depth, and the time distribution rule of prescription dispensing was found. By real-time analysis of the number of patients in the upstream link to the medication withdrawal step, the early warning of the number of patients was realized. Regularity and real-time early warning of the number of medicines users should establish a flexible and efficient scheduling system for pharmacists, so about maximize the use efficiency of human resources in outpatient pharmacies. Mean while, rearranged the medicines shelves according to the relevancy analysis of medicines in the same prescription, to reduce the walking distance of staff.Results: Based on the optimization of outpatient service process of large data, the waiting time for patients to take medicine was shortened from more than 15 minutes to less than 10 minutes, satisfaction increased from less than 65% to more than 85%, and the use of personnel was maximized.Conclusions: Through in-depth analysis and deep excavation of the real-time monitoring of outpatient prescription volume, managers can improve the outpatient service process, and through the monitoring and early warning of outpatient prescription volume, employees can be arranged, which is helpful to realize the digital, refined and intelligent management of the hospital.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHIN-YAN CHIOU ◽  
Ya-Xin Dong ◽  
Kun-Ju Lin

Abstract Background: At present, medical personnel use manual scheduling methods to calculate usage times of PET devices, hospital beds, operating rooms, and other treatment spaces. However, as patient treatment and recovery times are unequal and uncertain, arriving times of the scheduled/temporary patients are unexpected, examination items, beds requirements, and drugs waiting times are different, and scan-again requirements are unexpected. Manual scheduling arrangements are easy to make mistakes and put pressure on employees. With changing scheduling arrangements, it is difficult to announce the estimated time to patients and their families in real time. As a result, family members keep asking medical staff about various situations and waiting time. This makes the process unstable and exhausts the medical staff. Although previous researches proposed algorithms for specific inspections to solve the equipment resource allocation problems and calculate outpatient visit time for outpatient clinics, there is no research on improving the PET process. This paper proposes a real-time automatic scheduling and control system for PET patients with Bluetooth Beacon positioning. Results: This system can automatically schedule, estimate, and instantly update the start and end time of various tasks of PET patients during examinations, and automatically allocate beds and real-time announce schedule information, allowing the schedule being automated, instant and almost optimized. Moreover, this system promptly reminds medical staffs in each area. This can greatly reduce the work of medical staff, avoid human error, improve the safety of drugs, and provide medical staff, patients and family members to view the inspection progress and estimated waiting time in real time, reducing the number of patients and family members to query medical staff. We implemented this system in an application for the Android system to prove the feasibility of the system. We also collected time data of 200 actual patients for 2 weeks in the Department of Nuclear Medicine of Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou, and put these data into the implementation program for simulation and comparison. It was found that the average time difference between manual and automatic scheduling was 7.32 minutes, and it could reduce the average examination time of 82% of patients by 6.14 minutes, proving the system's correctness and efficiency. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to propose a real-time automatic scheduling and control system for PET patients.


BJPsych Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (S1) ◽  
pp. S113-S113
Author(s):  
Oksana Zinchenko ◽  
Jennifer Hyland

AimsThis audit was to assess and improve the organizational efficiency of referrals to Inverness Sector A Outpatient Service. The referrals were audited to measure the average waiting time from referral to first offered outpatient appointment and to assess the proportion of patients waiting longer than 12 weeks.MethodThe audit included routine referrals to the CMHT Inverness Sector A, NHS Highland from GP practices: Kingsmills, Burnfield, Riverside, Fairfield, Foyers and Drumnadrochit Medical Practices. The number of referrals and the number and proportion of clients given appointments for assessments were calculated. Referrals were received directly from primary care and the Mental Health Liaison Team or following Out of Hours contacts at the Mental Health Assessment Team.Data were collected retrospectively: referrals from 1 Jan 2020–31 Aug 2020. Sample size came to 160 patients aged 16–65 years. Data were collected via review of recorded documentation on the NHSH electronic patient record systems (SCIstore), from 5th–25th January 2021.Result160 patients (male 82, female 78) were referred from 1 Jan to 1 Sept 2020. Of these, 140 (87.5%) were given an appointment for an assessment. The mean waiting time was 12 weeks for 103 patients (64%), with 57 patients (36%) waiting longer than 13 weeks. The bimodal distribution of waiting times prompted an analysis of those with longer waiting times. In some instances, appointments were delayed because patients either did not attend (DNA) or cancelled their appointments. Reasons for delays included: postponement until further information was available; cancellation of meetings or patients DNA. In 20 cases (12.5%), the referrals deemed inadequate, prompting further liaison with the referrer for clarification about the nature of the problem and previous psychological interventions.ConclusionThe number of transactions (any amendment to a patient record) was higher than the number of patients affected, as several transactions can relate to one patients’ record.Most referrals are vetted in advance via the daily Inverness triage huddle. Ways of improving the quality of information provided by referrers would be explored.On receipt of each referral, the date of the 12 week deadline would be calculated and highlighted in a database.The cross-sector (Highland wide) standardisation will add clarity about medical capacity, that does not involve use of excessive clinician time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
Rusli Rusli

Timeliness of service was a common problem that occured in outpatient installations. The purpose of this study was to identify the waiting time of outpatient service in Yowari Jayapura General Hospital. The study observed and interviewed 379 respondents randomly from May to June 2015. Location of study was registration counter, pharmacy and 4 polyclinics (child, obstetrics, interna and surgery). The study found the waiting time in registration counter was 14 minutes. Meanwhile, the waiting time of each polyclinic was varied. The fastest waiting time occured in child polyclinic (48 minutes) and longest in obstetric polyclinic (58 minutes). Waiting time for pharmacyservice was differentiated by type of recipe where for non pooker recipe type was 14 minutes, while puyer was 34 minutes. This study recommended the addition of the number of health workers to encourage the service process so as to support the effectiveness and satisfaction for the community.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
Rusli Rusli

Timeliness of service was a common problem that occured in outpatient installations. The purpose of this study was to identify the waiting time of outpatient service in Yowari Jayapura General Hospital. The study observed and interviewed 379 respondents randomly from May to June 2015. Location of study was registration counter, pharmacy and 4 polyclinics (child, obstetrics, interna and surgery). The study found the waiting time in registration counter was 14 minutes. Meanwhile, the waiting time of each polyclinic was varied. The fastest waiting time occured in child polyclinic (48 minutes) and longest in obstetric polyclinic (58 minutes). Waiting time for pharmacy service was differentiated by type of recipe where for non pooker recipe type was 14 minutes, while puyer was 34 minutes. This study recommended the addition of the number of health workers to encourage the service process so as to support the effectiveness and satisfaction for the community.


Author(s):  
Krum Videnov ◽  
Vanya Stoykova

Monitoring water levels of lakes, streams, rivers and other water basins is of essential importance and is a popular measurement for a number of different industries and organisations. Remote water level monitoring helps to provide an early warning feature by sending advance alerts when the water level is increased (reaches a certain threshold). The purpose of this report is to present an affordable solution for measuring water levels in water sources using IoT and LPWAN. The assembled system enables recording of water level fluctuations in real time and storing the collected data on a remote database through LoRaWAN for further processing and analysis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-119
Author(s):  
Zhang Su

Background: In recent years, sudden deaths of primary and secondary school students caused by sports activities have drawn great attention in education and medical circles. It is necessary for schools to monitor the physical condition of the students in order to reasonably set the duration of their physical activity. At present, the physical condition monitoring instruments used in various hospitals are expensive, bulky, and difficult to operate, and the detection process is complicated. Therefore, existing approaches cannot meet the needs of physical education teachers on campus for detecting the physical condition of students. Methods: This study designs a portable human-physiological-state monitoring and analysis system. Real-time communication between a wearable measurement device and a monitoring device can be ensured by real-time detection of the environment and power control of the transmitted signal. Results: From a theoretical point of view, the larger the number of segments M, the more significantly the reduction of false alarm probability. The simulation results also show this fact. Compared with the conventional early warning mechanism, the probability of a false alarm for the proposed system is lower, and the greater the number of segments, the faster its reaction speed. Conclusion: The portable monitoring system of student physical condition for use in physical education of primary and middle school students proposed in this paper ensures real-time monitoring of the members within the system in an open environment, and further proposes an early warning mechanism for combining multiple vital sign parameters. In addition, the proposed system functions faster; the average early warning time required is only one-quarter of that of the conventional system.


Author(s):  
Jun-hua Chen ◽  
Da-hu Wang ◽  
Cun-yuan Sun

Objective: This study focused on the application of wearable technology in the safety monitoring and early warning for subway construction workers. Methods: With the help of real-time video surveillance and RFID positioning which was applied in the construction has realized the real-time monitoring and early warning of on-site construction to a certain extent, but there are still some problems. Real-time video surveillance technology relies on monitoring equipment, while the location of the equipment is fixed, so it is difficult to meet the full coverage of the construction site. However, wearable technologies can solve this problem, they have outstanding performance in collecting workers’ information, especially physiological state data and positioning data. Meanwhile, wearable technology has no impact on work and is not subject to the inference of dynamic environment. Results and conclusion: The first time the system applied to subway construction was a great success. During the construction of the station, the number of occurrences of safety warnings was 43 times, but the number of occurrences of safety accidents was 0, which showed that the safety monitoring and early warning system played a significant role and worked out perfectly.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wanhua Xie ◽  
Yunhe Gao ◽  
Weichi Tan

BACKGROUND In the conventional method, the blood pressure values of pregnant women were measured by nurses in the obstetrics outpatient clinics, and then were entered into the computer system.The pregnant women should wait for long time to complete this process.We hypothesized that the self-service blood pressure measurement by pregnant women could be a better option rather than measuring the blood pressure by nurses. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to analyze the effect of self-service blood pressure measurement in obstetrical outpatient clinic on waiting time, satisfaction of pregnant women and outpatient volume, and provide reference for the optimization of outpatient service processes. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study. The waiting time and satisfaction degree of pregnant women, as well as the outpatient volume in the Obstetrics Outpatient Clinic were compared on the use of self-service blood pressure measurement system with the conventional method. A total of 519 pregnant women in the obstetrics outpatient clinics of Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center in China participated in the satisfaction survey. The sample means were compared with t-test. RESULTS Compared to wait a longer queue for blood pressure measured by nurses, after using the self-service blood pressure measurement system, the waiting time of pregnant women for blood pressure measurement was significantly reduced from (18.57±9.68) min to (2.39±1.96) min (P<0.001). In addition, the satisfaction degree of pregnant women was significantly increased (P<0.001), and the monthly outpatient volume was significantly increased (P=0.02,P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS This study showed that after implementation of self-service blood pressure measurement, the waiting time of the pregnant women for blood pressure measurement was decreased significantly, while the satisfactory degree and outpatient flow were increased significantly, improving the cost-effectiveness.Therefore, this method is worth to be popularized in clinical practices. Relevance to clinical practice: How to use medical intelligence in clinical practices, replace manual works by self-service devices to address the high outpatient flow, high work load of medical personnel, and improve the experience of patients in seeking medical services are the most concerned issues by both patients as well as hospital managers.This study demonstrated that the self-service blood pressure measurement as a promising strategy in clinical practices and provided reference for the optimization of outpatient service processes. CLINICALTRIAL This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center (approval number:SFE-KL-46401; Supplementary file 4). All the pregnant women included in this study signed the informed consent form.


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. i12-i42
Author(s):  
C Abbott ◽  
K Bishop ◽  
F Hill ◽  
C Finlow ◽  
R Maraj

Abstract Introduction In September 2017 our frailty service was started within our medium sized DGH in North Wales. Working with our management team we secured a significant clinical resource including: We describe how resources, setting and staffing develop over a 2 year period in order to create a service which meets the needs of the local population. Method The service has been in a constant state of development since it has been in operation, utilising a PDSA model with regular meetings of clinical and managerial staff to analyse performance. Results With each new PDSA cycle the amount of patients reviewed has increased. With the move to AMU we increased the monthly number of patients reviewed from 29 to 172 patients reviewed, 97 of which were discharged directly from the unit. Conclusion Using QI methodology our Frailty Service has improved dramatically since its inception. We will continue to analyse how we work to improve patient outcomes and cost effectiveness.


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