Simulation modelling to assist operational management and planning in clinical laboratories

Article Abstract:

Clinical laboratories must balance staff and equipment utilization with specimen throughput and turnaround time while reducing errors, costs and employee health hazards. Simulation can help to anticipate the effect of new technology, alternative operating procedures and lab capacity changes. GPSS/H-386 was used to simulate the analyzer area of a hospital clinical chemistry lab and the time-consuming pre-analytic processes of both a large hospital lab and a commercial laboratory outpatient facility. The processes modelled were the arrival of patients and receipt of specimens into the lab, data entry, blood-drawing, centrifugation and aliquotting. The greatest challenge was accurate modelling of a system driven by human decision making with flexible task priorities. Experiments in the outpatient facility indicated that staff resources could be pooled instead of having specific job assignments without a significant effect on performance measures, and that an amalgamation of two outpatient labs could reduce staffing. These conclusions were not intuitively obvious to the lab managers. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Automation, Laboratories, Computer science, Technical, Animation software, Modeling, Data modeling software, Health Care, Planning Applications, Operation of Computer Systems, Data Collection

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Modular simulation of the static portion of the leaf energy budget

Article Abstract:

The ability to simulate the static energy budget of the green leaf is needed before any of the dynamic leaf functions such as stomatal control or the interactions among the intermediates of photosynthesis can be studied on the computer. This program uses a windowed interface, interactive control of 23 environmental and structural variables, and a modular design to build such a simulation. The modular design allowed by the newer implementation environments, such as Borland's Turbo Pascal V, means that further dynamic functions which require elements of the static energy budget can be simply added as additional modules. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Biology, Photochemistry, Dynamic memory allocation, Modularity, Software architectures, Energy, technical, Dynamic Allocation

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