Modeling And Optimized Design Of Hospital Outpatient Pharmacy Picking System

Hospital outpatient pharmacies, which directly face to patients, are an integral part of medical logistics. There are mostly outdated equipped and inefficient medicines picking system in traditional pharmacies, which make the patients wait for a long time to get the medicine. So it is meaningful to improve the efficiency of the outpatient pharmacy by redesigning and optimizing the medicine picking system.In this paper, based on the analysis of the prescriptions of hospital outpatient pharmacy and the queue feature characteristics of the patient, the medicine picking system for pharmacy is modeled and simulated, which includes the picking strategy, the equipment selection and the service window planning. The purpose is to improve the efficiency of the picking system and save waiting time for the patients.First, using the theory and method of logistics system, the elements of picking system for outpatient pharmacy are analyzed in detail. We get the characteristics of the prescriptions and items by analyzing the data on a certain day of a hospital using methods of EIQ and ABC. In addition, combining with the particularity of the medicine storage and picking, we determine the picking strategy and two different equipments.Second, based on analyzing the pharmacy and the outpatient pharmacy working process, a model is built using Petri-net to describe two different picking processes and order consolidation process. In order to verify the feasibility, the picking system is simulated and optimized using Flexsim. The experimental results prove the validity of the picking system, which can meet the hospital demand during the peak medicine picking.Finally, in order to make sure the plan of the service window, a patient's queue model is built using queuing theory, and the parameters of the patients coming distribution function are obtained from observation and statistics, which are simulated with different numbers of service windows. By comparing the average length of the queue, the average waiting time, the average stay time as well as taking the cost of pharmacy into account, the number of the service window is determined.By designing and optimizing the medicine picking system, we improve the medicine picking efficiency, reduce the error rate and decrease the amount of worker labor, in order to provide a comfortable environment for the pharmacists. At the same time, the number of the service window is reasonable, which can reduce the waiting time and improve patient satisfaction.