Case Article—Miller Pain Treatment Center—Eastern Hospital Outpatient Center

Introductory courses in operations management typically introduce students to process analysis and queuing theory. We apply these tools to consider patient flows in an outpatient clinic where processes are made more complex by inclusion of the teaching mission of an Academic Medical Center. The case narrative deals with a physician who moved his practice from a setting with no teaching mission to the academic setting. This created a natural experiment because he began treating the same patients using a different process flow. Students are asked to use data collected at both settings to compare and contrast these flows. The protagonist weighs options designed to improve an appointment schedule, change patient punctuality, and introduce a type of pre-processing of patients. Evaluation of these proposals calls for a different style of analysis. Students are introduced to the use of discrete event simulation to address such questions. Simulation models are provided corresponding to the two clinic settings. This allows students to conduct and learn from virtual experiments using calibrated models. The case fills a need for material that covers issues in healthcare delivery, which the basic tools of process analysis and queuing theory are insufficient to fully address.

The simulation tool and the teaching note are available at https://www.informs.org/Publications/Subscribe/Access-Restricted-Materials.