Evaluating Different Strategies on the Blood Collection Counter Settings to Improve Patient Waiting Time in Outpatient Units.

Long patient waiting time is one of the major problems in the healthcare system and it would decrease patient satisfaction. Previous studies usually investigated how to improve the treatment flow in order to reduce patient waiting time or length of stay. The studies on blood collection counters have received less attention. Therefore, the objective of this study is to reduce the patient waiting time at outpatient clinics for metabolism and nephrology outpatients. A discrete-event simulation is used to analyze the four different strategies for blood collection counter resource allocation. Through analyzing four different strategic settings, the experimental results revealed that the maximum number of patients waiting before the outpatient clinics was reduced from 41 to 33 (20%); the maximum patient waiti-ng time at the outpatient clinics was decreased from 201.6 minutes to 83 minutes (59%). In this study, we found that adjusting the settings of blood collection counters would be beneficial. Assigning one exclusive blood collection counter from 8 to 10 am is the most suitable option with the least impact on the operational process for hospital staff. The results provide managerial insight regarding the cost-effective strategy selection for the hospital operational strategy.

fMRI Investigation of Semantic Lexical Processing in Healthy Control and Alzheimer's Disease Subjects Using Naming Task: A Preliminary Study.

For decades, scientists have been trying to solve the problem of dementia, with no cure currently available. Semantic-lexical impairment is well established as the early critical sign of dementia, although there are still gaps in knowledge that must be investigated. In this study, we used fMRI to observe the neural activity of 31 subjects, including 16 HC (Healthy Control) and 15 AD (Alzheimer's Disease), who participated in the naming task. The neuropsychology profile of HC (Healthy Control) and AD (Alzheimer's Disease) are discussed in this study. The involvement of FG (Fusiform Gyrus) and IFG (Inferior Frontal Gyrus) shows dominant activation in both of the groups. We observed a decrease in neural activity in the AD group, resulting in semantic deficit problems in this preliminary study. Furthermore, ROI analysis was performed and revealed both hyperactivation and hypoactivation in the AD group. The compensatory mechanism demonstrated during the task, due to the effort required to identify an animal's name, represents the character profile of AD.