Analytics to Improve Service in a Pre-admission Testing Clinic

Health care organizations are beginning to use analytics to improve their quality of care. Objective of this paper is to provide a case study of using analytics to improve a healthcare process. We focus on providing a big picture of the project rather than presenting details of our data analysis and models used. We explain the operations of a Pre-Admission Testing Clinic (PATC) in a hospital and efforts to improve patient service by using analytics. A PATC gathers important patient information and performs all procedure-specific tests to get the patients ready for surgery in the Operating Room (OR) on surgery date. Patients are either scheduled an appointment in advance or allowed to walk-in to receive service in the PATC. Recently, the management has observed increased patient wait. Through data collection and analysis, we provided many valuable insights to the management on causes of the problem and suggested cost effective strategies to improve patient service.