Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Eagle Medical Tray Denesting & Debris Removal Process, Nicholas Allen Ungefug, Noah Chavez, Susana Shu-Lin Okhuysen, Michael Augustine Pennington

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Eagle Medical Incorporated is a contract medical device packaging and sterilization company. The company purchases thermoformed medical packaging trays, which maintain the sterility of medical devices, from various manufacturers. To ensure packaging quality and to prevent cleanroom contamination, Eagle Medical inspects and sterilizes each blister tray that they order. This process is an essential non-value-added activity that creates a bottleneck. Cleanroom employees must stop packaging medical devices and attend to the processing of blister trays and packaging solutions. The blister trays arrive at Eagle’s facility in nested stacks. Vibration and movement during shipping further compresses the stacks, which makes separation …

Inpatient Discharge-By-Noon: Are Fewer Better Than All?, Nicholas Ballester, Pratik J. Parikh, Kara Combs, Jordan S. Peck

Journal of Maine Medical Center

Introduction: To address boarding in hospital emergency departments, discharge-by-noon could free up inpatient beds earlier in the day. However, discharging all patients by noon can heavily burden inpatient units and may not be feasible. In this study, we determine the number of discharges after which the benefits of an additional discharge-by-noon diminish.

Methods: We conducted a simulation analysis to quantify how occupancy rate, mean daily number of discharges, and peak discharge time impact upstream boarding time in an inpatient neurology unit at Maine Medical Center. Using a day-of-discharge simulation model with one year of retrospective data, we assessed configurations approximating …