When the Senior Administrator was reviewing the quarterly activity reports, he was perturbed by the report from MRI. Recently the hospital had installed two new state-of-art MRI machines when the earlier single MRI could not handle the patient load. It was expected that the case load would double with easy appointment availability. However the numbers had not increased as per expectation.
So he decided to make a surprise visit to check the facts. Was he in for a surprise!
He went to the MRI at 11:00 pm and there were two families waiting in the MRI lounge. At first he dismissed it thinking they were emergency patients. However, on questioning the staff, the response was casual ‘these are appointment patients…you know how busy we are na? It’s like this every day Sir!’
When he spoke to the patient relatives he was even more astonished. Mrs. Khatija told him ‘we waited for more than a day for an appointment for my son and still got only a 10.00 pm appointment! The doctors says there may be a brain tumour, so what choice do we have but to take whatever appointment was available at the earliest, even so late at night!’.
This was also the case for Mr. Mehta. His doctor suspected a spinal cause for his back pain. Mr Mehta explained, ‘I have difficulty is sitting for so long, so the MRI team has kindly offered me a stretcher to lie down, but I am still waiting for my turn and it is not very comfortable. It seems there is a delay of 30 minutes but what can I do? I will wait!’
So in spite of 2 MRIs it seemed the problem of appointment availability was also not resolved!
Lessons Learned:
- Delay in performing scans lead to patient dis-satisfaction
- This was adversely impacted the hospital referral base and in turn was limiting future revenue opportunities
- This also generated patient loss to outpatient diagnostics
The management reviewed the case and the main question was “Is underutilization of MRI machines because inefficiency on the part of our staff, doctors, and technicians?”
A detailed study using Lean Six sigma methodology was done wherein monthly volume and available time (based on available working hours) was studied to understand the underutilization of the resources, namely, manpower and equipment, with an aim to improve utilization of MRI.
The daily working hours were reduced from 32 hours to 30 hours with a reduction in average MRI time from 74 minutes to 60 minutes.
We were successful in reducing one manpower requirement by re-scheduling staff shift timings without hampering departmental functioning.
The patient load increased from 650 to more than 700 per month with changes.
Lessons Learned