MSU Health Care
Maximizing Space Utilization and Efficiency of Clinics
Background:
MSU Health Care is the largest physician practice group in the Mid-Michigan area, consisting of 28 clinics and over 500 employees including providers from College of Human Medicine, College of Osteopathic Medicine and College of Nursing. Professional staff (physicians, PAs, NPs) split their time between clinical activities, teaching, and research, which often results in schedule conflicts that affect patient care services. Due to the conflicting provider functions, many of the clinics fluctuate with clinical activity, from days where there are too many providers to allow accommodation of enough patients in the available space to fill the providers’ schedules, to days when there are not enough providers available to maximize use of available space to provide for additional patient visits.
Objective:
The objective of this project will be to increase the efficiency of the clinics by optimizing the use of space and clinical staff to maximize the number of patient visits that can be accommodated each day.
Goal:
The goal of the project will be to utilize 100% of clinic providers and available space to increase allowable patient visits. We currently have 259 exam rooms available throughout our clinics where multiple clinics are less than 20% utilization of their available space. Our goal is to have review of all clinics to increase current space utilization to greater than 90% and improve access to care for our patients and communities we serve. Importance of level loading the patient volumes over the course of the week will allow for increased space utilization and provider productivity.
Data:
Patient visit numbers, provider schedules.
Deliverables:
- Project Presentation – a presentation given at the end of each phase of the project detailing the findings and suggested next steps.
- Project Documentation – A detailed document explaining the data used and method to derive the findings.
- Detailed plan to implement changes that will accomplish our goal.
