Baylor Cardiac Patient Flow Simulation
Client: Baylor Heart Hospital
Team: Ashley Backwith, Steven Chapman, Ikechukwu Irozura, Kelly Nelson, Josh Urquhart
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Barr Year: 1998
Documents: Final report
Baylor University Medical Center, a five-hospital complex located just north of downtown Dallas, is one of the leading tertiary care teaching and referral centers in Texas and the Southwest. Our project focused on the planned heart hospital, which is to be built across Worth Street from the main hospital tower. This eight-story facility would be financed and run jointly by Baylor and three major cardiac physician groups. The third floor of the hospital would house the cathology and electrophysiology labs that provide diagnostic tests and host several non-emergency procedures.
A team consisting of Baylor employees and the Healthcare Environmental Design architectural firm has been working on the floor plan and design of this facility. Since the project involves multi-million dollar expenditures from both the physicians and the hospital, and tasks that are vital to the welfare of cardiology patients will be performed there, the two sponsors want to insure the facility can handle the expected patient flow in the new heart hospital. As a result, our team has been asked to collect data, run a simulation for the new facility, and analyze the results.
To accomplish this task, we used data taken from logs, hospital databases, nurse and doctor estimates, and personal observations to construct a MedModel (software designed to simulate medical facilities) model which simulated the heart hospital environment. According to the simulation, the third floor of the heart hospital will be able to support the expected patient flow with no glitches if some minor changes are made.