ISOM 5700 Operations Management

Group Assignment 1
Williamsport Hospital
Ameya PANDIT Meng Yang NG 20537073
Simai HUANG 20576067 Thomas LU 20577140

Analyzing pros and cons of service line approach

Service Line Approach

Pros Cons

Less weekly meetings and more time Insufficient physical therapists could be
spent treating patients bottleneck and cause idle time for other
therapists

Better interdisciplinary sharing and quicker Higher staffing costs

decision making
More consistent treatment by care
providers

Allocation of therapists for head injury

When four physical therapists are assigned to the head injury service line, they have the
capacity to treat 12 (4 x 3) patients per day. For the head injury line, the mean is 9.07 and
the standard deviation is 3.01. Thus, we know the outcome of NORMINV (Probability,
9.07, 3.01) is 12, and need to find the probability. Using Solver in Excel, the probability is
83.47%, i.e. the probability that the demand for physical therapy will not be met on a
particular day is 16.53% (1 - 0.8347).

When a service level of at least 95% is required, using NORMINV (95%, 9.07, 3.01), we get
the result of 14.02. This is the capacity to treat the number of patients per day. As each
physical therapist can serve three patients per day, the physical therapists would need to
be assigned to head injury line is 5 (14.02/ 3 = 4.67, rounded up to 5).
 Head Injury Line
Mean 9.07 patients/day
Std Dev 3.01
Physical therapist capacity 3 patients/day
No. of physical therapists 4
Capacity to treat patients per
day 12 11.99999533
Service Level 83%

Targeted Service Level 95%

Optimal no. of physical
therapists 4.67
5

Therapists allocation as per different service line

In a single physical therapy department, the required number of physical therapists are
25 (exact number to be at 24.9). If physical therapists are assigned to each of the other
four other service lines, all at the service level of 95%, the allocation is as following:

No. of Physical No. of Physical

Service Line Mean Std Dev Therapists Therapists
(raw data) (rounded up)

Head Injury 9.07 3.01 4.68 5

Stroke 14.58 3.82 6.95 7

Spinal Cord, Neuro-injury, multi-

6.81 2.61 3.70 4
trauma
Orthopedic, Arthritis,
amputation, pain syndrome, 28.40 5.33 12.39 13
debility/other
Pulmonary, Cardiac 2.99 1.73 1.94 2
TOTAL 31
 Single Physical Therapy Department

Mean no. of patients per day 61.84

Std Dev 7.9

Required no. of physical therapists 24.9~25

More physical therapists are required in the Service line approach as they can't switch to
or support other departments. This would mean that the hospital needs to hire 6 more
therapists to continue with the service line approach.

Organizing a Swing team as another option

To capture the benefits of the service lines while still maintaining a reasonable utilization
level of physical therapists, we offer an alternative solution by using a Swing team.

• The total patient days is 22,571, which means that we need at least 21 physical
therapists to achieve the 50% service level. (=22,571/365/3)
• For each service line, we calculated the no. of physical therapists that can
satisfied the need based on the daily average no. of patients.
• For example, for the head injury service line,
we can know that the average no. of patients per
day is 9.07, and it means that we need at least 3
therapists. (=3,311/365/3)
• We allocate these 20 therapists to each group
as settled therapists according to the number we
calculated in question 2. And for the rest of the
therapists, we place them in a swing team.
• The therapists in the swing team will then be
allocated to different service lines according to the
actual number of patients for each day.