Ms. Neha Reddy

Yash Daultani

Dr. Sushil Kumar

Abstract

Healthcare is attracting a lot of attention because of its prospects to be a game changerand a major driver of the growth engine of our country Healthcare services in India are far behind in operational effectiveness, when compared to other service industries, Healthcare poses particular challenges to managers due to its nature of intangibility, time-sensitivity, urgency and high levels of customer involvement. Future would see more and more emphasize on creating, delivering and managing healthcare services productively. More specifically, managing outpatient department services cost effectively is current need of the hospitals along with satisfying continuously increasing patient expectations. Average patient waiting time vs. overall facility utilization is a key trade-off in the delivery of health care services. Industrial engineering has greatpotential of applications in this sector so as to improve productivity. Considering these aspects, this study outlines aneffort in this direction to showcase a simple use of process analysis to improve the processesin outpatient department of a medium size hospital. Pharmacy is identified as a bottleneck followed by developing service blueprint for the same. All processes involved are observed and documented with involved cycle times. It leads to reducing the lead time inavailing services, especially in the circumstances where every minute spent adds to the vowsof the customers-patients and their aids.

Keywords- healthcare; service operations; outpatient department; pharmacy