Emergency room use at “SAVE-ME!” Hospital peaks on Saturday nights during the period from 7:00pm to 2:00am.Historically, the hospital has provided 4 examining rooms for nonemergency cases and 2 examining rooms for emergency cases during that period. Nonemergency patients are examined on a first-come, first-served basis, and emergency cases are treated on a most-serious, first-served basis, after a triage nurse has screened all cases. The data on patient arrival pattern were collected on Saturday nights. During a total of 100 hours, there were 900 nonemergency and 150 emergency patients came to the ER during the peak time. The average service time was found to be 30 minutes per nonemergency and 75 minutes per emergency patient. An area competitor hospital recently announced discontinuation of emergency services. “SAVE-ME!” Hospital estimates that the current arrival patterns during the 7:00pm to 2:00am period would increase by one-third for nonemergency cases and would double f
or emergency cases. Thus, “SAVE-ME!” Hospital decided to add 3 additional examining rooms for nonemergency cases and 2 additional rooms for emergency cases. You are asked by the operation manager to:
1) Use queueing model to analyze both the emergency and the nonemergency capaticy and performances measures taking into the consideration the discontinuation of the evergency services of the area competitor;
2) Based on the costs information provided by the finance/accounting department (shown below) to determine the overall cost of operations for nonemergency and for emergency patients;
3) Determine if more additional examining rooms should be added to reduce the congestion and waiting time, as well as the overall cost of operations for nonemergency and for emergency patients. If so, how many more additioanl examining rooms would you suggest be added for noneEmergency and Emergency cases and how much total cost can it be reduced if your suggested additional examining rooms are added.