University Hospital: The Joint EP/CATH Lab Decision

Health care management requires careful planning for efficient operations, in an environment where technology, best practices, and patient demands continue to change rapidly. This case study presents an operations management decision at a large academic medical center in response to falling demand for cardiac catheterization (CATH) procedures and growing demand for electrophysiology (EP) procedures, and requires students to consider all angles of the decision. Merging two currently separate but clinically similar labs into a contiguous physical space would allow for more efficient scheduling and operational efficiency in the shared space, as well as affect clinical outcomes, and patient and staff satisfaction. In this case study, students analyze the operational decisions required to plan the merger of the two labs to achieve operational, financial, and clinical hospital objectives, using a dataset too large to analyze manually. The case asks students to create compelling visual representations of these data, use a discrete event simulation (DES) model, and present their results as if to hospital leadership.