A health clinic, located in a large city, sees patients on a walk-in basis only. All patients register at the registration window with a registration clerk (RC), which takes 3 minutes. After registration, but before being seen by a nurse practitioner (NP), the registration records clerk (RRC) pulls the patients’ records from the records room, which takes 4.5 minutes. At his or her turn, each patient then sees a NP, who checks weight, temperature, and blood pressure. This work activity takes 5 minutes. Then the NP sends patients to two examination rooms served by two doctors (MD). Assume that it is equally possible that the NP will send patients to any one of two examination rooms and both MD take on average 15 minutes per patient. After the patient sees the MD, the patient pays the bill or processes insurance information with the billing clerk (BC), which takes 5 minutes per patient. Then, the patient exits the process. There are one RC (stage 1), one RRC (stage 2), one NP (stage 3), two MDs (stage 4), and one BC (stage 5) in the system at the current time. (Note: In this problem, you don’t need to round to the nearest integer number. For fractional numbers, please keep two decimal digits.)
a. What is the capacity in patients per hour of each stage in the process?
b. What stage/activity is the bottleneck? What is the capacity of the process?
c. Using the data collected, the actual throughput rate is determined as 7 patients per hour. What is capacity utilization of the clinic?
