Identifying the bottleneck unit: Impact of congestion spillover in hospital inpatient unit network
Song-Hee Kim1, Fanyin Zheng2, Joan Brown3
1SNU Business School, Korea, Republic of (South Korea); 2Columbia Business School, USA; 3Keck Medicine of USC, USA
Discussant: Vishal Gaur (Johnson School, Cornell University)
We use 5-year data from a hospital with 16 inpatient units to empirically examine whether and how much congestion propagates through the network of inpatient units. We find that the magnitude of the congestion spillover is substantial in our study hospital. We then use counterfactual analyses to empirically identify the bottleneck unit---the unit that has the biggest impact on system performance when an intervention is applied to increase its capacity.