Daily Pattern Arrivals

When Will You Need This?

Automatically analyses raw arrival data, creates distributions and imports the restructured data into ProcessModel. You provide historical data for months of arrivals. This model object:

1. Analyses the data.

2. Shows a graphical summary of raw data.

3. Finds the arrival quantities for each day of the week.

4. Removes outliers.

5. Shows data needing conversion to a distribution.

6. Creates the daily distribution to spread arrivals over the hour of the day.

7. Automatically imports the data into ProcessModel.

Model Object

The following model object will be used to create daily pattern arrivals for healthcare and import data into ProcessModel: Arrivals \ Daily Pattern Arrivals.

Ease of Use: Easy

Ease of Modification: Easy

How to Use the Model Object

1. Open Your Model

Open your model or create a new blank model.

2. Insert the Model Object into Your Model

Locate the appropriate location in your model where you would like to place the model object, move the view to the location and then insert the model object.

3. Connect to Your Model

Connect the route exiting from activity Acuity to the rest of your model.

4. Open the Excel File

Right click on the Daily Pattern Arrivals Sheet Excel icon and click on the third option from the bottom to open the Daily Pattern Arrivals v-x-x Excel file, where x-x represents the version number of the Excel file.

Before using this Excel file for the first time, or after changing your model name, make sure that a manual export of data is done via ProcessModel. From your model, click Tools \ Export Data, click ‘Yes’ to all prompts until the data export file opens, close the data file and then use this Excel file.

Click Enable Content if prompted

5. Enter Raw Data

After opening the Daily Pattern Arrivals vx-x Excel file, the Input worksheet appears.

1. Copy your date and time data and paste into cell A3. You need at least 6 months of data. Use the Excel date and time format, sample data is included.

2. Copy your acuity / priority levels and paste them into cell B3. Enter the number that is considered the highest acuity level in your system. You must provide a value between 1 to 9, based on what the highest acuity is in your data. Where 1 is the highest acuity.

If you do not have acuity data you can leave the column empty.

3. Enter any holidays into cell C3. The holidays are optional and are only used to help you review data before import.

Sample data must be removed prior to entry of your data.

You must provide at-least 24 weeks worth of data

6. Prepare Arrival Data for Processmodel

Click the button titled Prepare Arrival Data for ProcessModel and allow 1 minute for the analysis (depends on the speed of your processor and the size of the file). Once completed you will land on the Daily Pattern Daily Qtys worksheet and should see upto three new worksheets in the same Excel file.

1. Daily Pattern Daily Qtys

2. Daily Pattern Hourly Qty

3. Daily Pattern Acuity

7. Review Your Data

Analyzing the Daily Pattern Daily Qtys

The Daily Pattern Daily Qtys worksheet is divided into three parts.

1. Raw Daily Arrivals

The first section of the Daily Pattern Daily Qtys is the Raw Daily Arrivals, you can review the raw data and see how the outliers change the way data is presented. The Whisker chart on the right helps review the outliers in more detail with the dots (•) representing any outliers. If you have identified “dates of holidays” in the input data, the green bars (shown on the sheet below) identify potential holiday related surges.

2. Daily Arrivals Outliers

In the second section you can review only the outliers. This section can be referenced to know what the data that was removed from the final data that will come below.

3. Daily Arrivals without Outliers

In this section you can review and use the final arrivals data with outliers removed. This section contains 3 steps that must be followed, the steps are highlighted in red.

Step 1. Click the Copy button on each of the rows representing the day of the week to copy the particular day arrivals, go back to ProcessModel and use Stat:Fit to fit a distribution.

Step 2. Copy/Export the distribution from Stat:Fit and paste it in the associated purple box.

Step 3. Click the Send Data to ProcessModel button. This will import all the raw data into ProcessModel, once the import is completed you will receive a prompt informing you of the same.

See Chapter 3.12.2 – Convert Raw Data to Distributions of the User’s Guide to learn more about Stat:Fit.

8. Completion

The daily patterns have now been added to your model. You can now save and then simulate the model.

Analyzing the Daily Pattern Hourly Qty

The Daily Pattern Hourly Qty worksheet contains the hourly distribution of arrivals and has charts on the right for each day that show the hourly distribution of arrivals for each day of the week, scroll down to review charts for all the days. There is no interaction required on this worksheet as it only displays useful daily hourly patterns for review.

Analyzing the Daily Pattern Acuity

The Daily Pattern Acuity worksheet contains a table that shows the distribution of priority across all entities. There is no interaction required on this worksheet as it only displays useful priority information for review.

Advanced Topic

Question: How the Daily Pattern Arrivals model was created and why you see an object instead of a separate entity and activities.

Answer: The Daily Pattern Arrivals model object has multiple entities and routes that need to be updated with the raw data, all the activities and routes, which the user does not need to change individually are grouped together with an object on top of it.