A Simulation Study for Safe Operations during COVID-19 at the Optimal Aging Clinic Trager Institute
LoDI Team: Lihui Bai, Arsalan Paleshi, Monica Gentili, Shahab Sadri
Period: June 2020 – September 2020
Overview
The Optimal Aging Clinic (OAC) at UofL Trager Institute provides multi-resource healthcare services such as primary care, geriatric care, psychotherapy and, also wellness programs like acupuncture, cooking, and exercise classes. This study helps the Trager Institute to operate safely and efficiently with respect to COVID-19 restrictions.
Purpose and Need
Patients and staff desire to resume services in-person mode, COVID-19 limitations, and the importance of both staff and patients’ safety, and managers’ concerns toward the institute efficiency were the main reasons for defining this simulation project. The goal is to resume as much as possible different types of activities in-person with respect to COVID-19 limitations. During COVID-19, a remarkable portion of primary care appointment times and almost all psychotherapy visits were booked in telehealth mode. Other clinic services like cooking and exercise classes, Tai Chi, etc. were canceled or provided on-line.
Methodology
To bring back some activities to in-person mode, LoDI created a discrete event simulation model based on Trager institute available data with AnyLogic software. The model includes activities such as primary care, psychotherapy, wellness and acupuncture, staff members in the clinic and also meetings, and regular activities of staff. To respect safety limitations four different areas were defined to be monitored during the simulation process to find out how much these areas could be crowded.
Here are some of the parameters we defined during several meetings with the Trager Institute to make the simulation as close as possible to reality:
1. Patients and staff arrival patterns.
2. Appointment time booking policy.
3. Flowchart of every provided service.
4. Staff and resources involved in each service.
5. Consuming time blocks and their times and special conditions (If applied).
Results and Impacts
After verification and validation of the proposed model, the simulation model outputs are as follows:
1. Number of people (staff, patients, doctors, etc.) who will be in the clinic based on new conditions.
2. Crowdedness of those four candidate areas during a day.
3. The most crowded hours of the clinic during those two busy days.