Simulation of triaging patients into an internal medicine department to validate the use of an optimization based workload score

This extended abstract provides an overview of the development of a simulation model to be used in the assistance of triaging patients into the Hospital Internal Medicine (HIM) Department at The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN in an effort to balance workload among the department services. The main contribution of this work is the development of a score that measures provider workload more accurately. Delphi surveys, conjoint analysis, and optimization methods were used in the creation of this score and it is believed to better represent provider workload. Preliminary results were based on the proportion of time of a month that each service was at or above "maximum utilization", which is how workload is currently viewed at an instance. A simulation model built in SIMIO 8 yielded a 12.1% decrease in the proportion of time that a service was at or above their "max utilization" on average, while also seeing a decrease in the average difference among these proportions by 8.3% (better balance among all services).