2002 Volume 22 Issue 2 Pages 179-188
In Japan, a large university hospital usually has a problem of crowding at an outpatient clinic. It is so difficult to get the continuous information of crowding at a glance that we made a resolution by a server client system on the Hospital Information System (HIS). This system is new in the aspect where the location of patients at outpatient clinic is reconstructed only by the logs on the HIS. Since HIS is based on order-entry, the time of order indicates that the patient is there. We implemented and assessed the system at the outpatient clinic of Gunma University Hospital. An analysis of waiting time and the crowding patterns at each weekday was matched exactly with the simultaneous inspection analysis. The results show that our system is effective to visualize the crowding of the outpatient clinic continuously so that we can resolve the problem timely. To analyze the human behavior using log files on the online computer system has a benefit for end users because they do not need of any extra key entries, and may open a new field in the hospital management and patient behavioral sciences.
