Patient flow workflow

Patient-flow workflow (notebook entry)

Steps from arrival to discharge:

1. Arrival and check-in

2. Triage (severity sorting)

3. Waiting room

4. Treatment room (exam and tests)

5. Lab and imaging results

6. Decision (admit or discharge)

7. Discharge

Queue points (where waiting accumulates): after check-in before triage, and especially in the waiting room before a treatment room opens, and again while waiting on lab and imaging results.

Identified bottleneck: the wait for an open treatment room (step 3 to step 4).

Justification: this is the highest-impact constraint because the ER has a fixed number of treatment rooms, so when they are full, every downstream patient waits no matter how fast triage works. Fixing triage speed alone will not help if there is nowhere to put patients.

Systems-thinking note: a single backed-up treatment-room queue raises the wait for every patient behind it, so one bottleneck affects every stakeholder downstream.