The optimization model for the service process of stomatology department via DES simulation

In recent years, the relationship between doctors and patients is becoming more and more tense. Many hospitals are paying more attention to the satisfaction of patients, because this is an important indicator to measure the quality of hospital services. In China, it is often a case that large-scale comprehensive hospitals such as the tertiary hospitals are always overcrowded and the waiting time for treatment is much higher than the time of treatment. The long waiting time will undoubtedly lead to lower patient satisfaction. Thus, how to improve patient satisfaction is focused on how to reduce patient waiting time. This study is based on the discrete event simulation (DES) method to construct an optimization model for the dental service process of a tertiary hospital in Changzhou. The data is collected through field research, and then we set the model parameters according to the existing service model. We suggest that adding pre-examination into the nursing triage process can improve the hospital’s service quality and enhance the resource utilization under limited resource conditions with reducing patient waiting time. In addition, we can inspire the hospital and other medical institutions to do some further improvements. After applying the proposed model, it can be seen that the effect is very significant that the average waiting time for treatment of the patient is reduced from 173 minutes to 45 minutes, and the length of stay (LOS) of the patient in the hospital is reduced from 209 minutes to 130 minutes.