New England Veterans Engineering Resource Center, Boston MA, USA.
Gen Hosp Psychiatry. 2013 Nov-Dec;35(6):668-70. doi: 10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2013.06.004. Epub 2013 Jul 20.
To improve clinic design, trial-and-error is commonly used to discover strategies that lead to improvement. Our goal was to predict the effects of various changes before undertaking them.
Systems engineers collaborated with staff at an integrated primary care-mental health care clinic to create a computer simulation that mirrored how the clinic currently operates. We then simulated hypothetical changes to the staffing to understand their effects on percentage of patients seen outside scheduled clinic hours and service completion time.
We found that, out of the change options being considered by the clinic, extending daily clinic hours by two and including an additional psychiatrist are likely to result in the greatest incremental decreases in patients seen outside clinic hours and in service time.
Simulation in partnership with engineers can be an attractive tool for improving mental health clinics, particularly when changes are costly and thus trial-and-error is not desirable.
为了改善诊所设计，通常会通过反复试验来寻找能够改进的策略。我们的目标是在进行之前预测各种变化的效果。
系统工程师与综合初级保健-心理健康诊所的工作人员合作，创建了一个计算机模拟，该模拟反映了诊所目前的运作方式。然后，我们模拟了对人员配备的假设性更改，以了解它们对预约外看诊患者的百分比和服务完成时间的影响。
我们发现，在所考虑的诊所变更选项中，延长每日诊所时间两个小时并增加一名额外的精神科医生，可能会导致预约外看诊患者和服务时间的最大增量减少。
与工程师合作进行模拟可能是改善心理健康诊所的一种有吸引力的工具，特别是在更改成本高昂且因此不希望进行反复试验的情况下。
