ArticleHealth care management science2013
Using discrete-event simulation in strategic capacity planning for an outpatient physical therapy service.
Article in Health care management science, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
- Optimizing patient flow logistics: strategic challenges, tactical solutions, and future directions.BMC health services research · 2025Pooled it
- Fractured systems: a literature review of OR/MS methods applied to orthopaedic care settings and treatments.Health systems (Basingstoke, England) · 2024Review
- Article
- Article
- Using Simulation Optimization to Solve Patient Appointment Scheduling and Examination Room Assignment Problems for Patients Undergoing Ultrasound Examination.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Appointment Scheduling Problem in Complexity Systems of the Healthcare Services: A Comprehensive Review.Journal of healthcare engineering · 2022Review
- Lean thinking by integrating with discrete event simulation and design of experiments: an emergency department expansion.PeerJ. Computer science · 2020Article
- Decreasing patient length of stay via new flexible exam room allocation policies in ambulatory care clinics.Health care management science · 2018Article
- Simulation analysis of resource flexibility on healthcare processes.Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This study uses a simulation model as a tool for strategic capacity planning for an outpatient physical therapy clinic in Taipei, Taiwan. The clinic provides a wide range of physical treatments, with 6 full-time therapists in each session. We constructed a discrete-event simulation model to study the dynamics of patient mixes with realistic treatment plans, and to estimate the practical capacity of the physical therapy room. The changes in time-related and space-related performance measurements were used to evaluate the impact of various strategies on the capacity of the clinic. The simulation results confirmed that the clinic is extremely patient-oriented, with a bottleneck occurring at the traction units for Intermittent Pelvic Traction (IPT), with usage at 58.9 %. Sensitivity analysis showed that attending to more patients would significantly increase the number of patients staying for overtime sessions. We found that pooling the therapists produced beneficial results. The average waiting time per patient could be reduced by 45 % when we pooled 2 therapists. We found that treating up to 12 new patients per session had no significantly negative impact on returning patients. Moreover, we found that the average waiting time for new patients decreased if they were given priority over returning patients when called by the therapists.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.