Hospital construction of building 500P and renovation of building 300P at Stanford Health Care will lead to shifting capacities in different hospital units over the next five years. The current workflow does not support University Medicine to operationalize six teams across the two future buildings. Given the patient care constraints for each team, it is important to consider the spatial distribution of patients located in different hospital units assigned to any given team. Maximizing the co-location of patients in the same units would allow for more time spent with patients for each team and less time walking in between them.
The objective of this project is to understand the current state of patient co-location in the hospital and to predict future trends given the changing unit capacities. We aim to develop a simulation model that determines future patient volume and unit occupancy and their impact on the co-location of Medicine patients.
To understand the current system, we combined qualitative results from shadowing and interviewing ANS and Medicine teams with quantitative results from analyzing census data. The former identified constraints in bed assignment and patient care, while the latter enabled us to evaluate the historic trends for patient flow and co-location in the hospital.
