A Simulation Study to Improve Performance in the Preparation and Delivery of Antineoplastic Medications at a Community Hospital

In this paper, we introduce a simulation study to improve the antineoplastic medication preparation and delivery performance at a pharmacy department in a large community hospital. The goal of this work is to help pharmacy reduce patients’ average waiting time when receiving chemotherapy. This will be achieved by simulating and analyzing the preparation and delivery procedures to identify process bottlenecks, carry out what-if analysis, predict the impact of improvement effort, and provide recommendations to hospital leadership. Using the simulation model, we discover that by introducing early preparation for the returning patients and dedicating an infusion staff member for medication delivery, patients’ waiting time for antineoplastic medications can be reduced substantially. Such improvements do not require additional floor space or significant investment. The recommendation has been accepted by hospital management and implemented in the pharmacy department. The preliminary results have verified the simulation output with the desired improvement predicted by the model.