Simulation modelling to assist operational management and planning in clinical laboratories

Clinical laboratories must balance staff and equipment utilization with specimen throughput and turnaround time while reducing errors, costs and employee health hazards. Simulation can help to anticipate the effect of new technology, alternative operating procedures and lab capacity changes. GPSS/H-386 was used to simulate the analyzer area of a hospital clinical chemistry lab and the time-consuming pre-analytic processes of both a large hospital lab and a commercial laboratory outpatient facility. The processes modelled were the arrival of patients and receipt of specimens into the lab, data entry, blood-drawing, centrifugation and aliquotting. The greatest challenge was accurate modelling of a system driven by human decision making with flexible task priorities. Experiments in the outpatient facility indicated that staff resources could be pooled instead of having specific job assignments without a significant effect on performance measures, and that an amalgamation of two outpatient labs could reduce staffing. These conclusions were not intuitively obvious to the lab managers.