1. What is your opinion of the level at which the data are being collected?

What are some of the advantages of collecting data at this level? 2. Aggregate the original data for October as you see appropriate (e.g., sum up by day of week, time of day, week of the month, etc.). This will give you a new data set to work with. Analyze your data for patterns. Can you find any? 3. Use at least two different forecasting models on the new data set you developed in question 2 by aggregating the original data. Compare their forecast performance and provide an evaluation. Jenn Kostich is the new department director for emergency services at Northwest General Hospital. One of her responsibilities is to ensure proper staffing in the emergency room (ER) by scheduling nurses to appropriate shifts. This has historically been a problem for the ER. The former director did not base nurse schedules on forecasts, but used the same fixed schedule week after week. Jenn had recently received her degree in operations management. She knew that schedules needed to be based on forecasts of demand. She needed to start by analyzing historical data in order to determine the best forecasting method to use. Jenns assistant provided her with information on patient arrivals in the ER by hour and day of the week for the previous month, October. October was considered a typical month for the ER, and Jenn thought it was a good starting point. Jenn reviewed the information (shown in the chart) that she had requested and wondered where to begin.

.:. SOLUTION:

1.

The data are collected by arrivals per hour of the day and day of the week. As nurses are scheduled by whole hours and by day, this level of detail is sufficient. An advantage of this level of detail is that nurses can be schedule to correspond to peak demand. For example, it appears that the highest demand occurs in the midafternoon to early evening. Jenn can either have nursing staff work a shift such as 10 to 6 or hire additional part-time nurses for the afternoon. Day of week data provides similar advantages. At first glance, it appears that the week-ends are busier. Jenn should schedule more nurses for those days. One level of detail that is missing is information on type of visit. It could be that the amount of time a nurse needs to spend with a patient varies by medical problem. For example, a wound may require more care than a fever. If this is true, and the percent of accident related injuries varies by hour or day, the Jenn would need to take this into account. Finally, we are told that Jenn believes October to be typical. We are not told if she is correct in this belief.

2.

The following summarizes the original data day of week and two-hour time slots (shifts probably will not start every hour).

Day Date Hour 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Percent

0.01 0.02 0.02 0.04 0.04 0.02 0.02 0.03 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.05 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.05 0.04 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.04 0.06 0.06 0.05

Day W T Date 1 2 Sum 56 53

F 3 72

S 4 75

S 5 77

M 6 43

T 7 42

W 8 58

T F S S M T W T F S S M T W T F S S M T W T F 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 24 26 27 28 29 30 31 55 69 73 74 43 44 59 56 73 74 77 41 43 59 44 73 74 75 40 44 59 45 73 Grand ave 59

Sum

1843

M T W T F S S 41.8 43.3 58.2 50.6 72 74 75.8 0.70 0.73 0.98 0.85 1.21 1.25 1.28

3.

To demonstrate the techniques, the forecasts below use moving average and exponential smoothing. First, I created a series of day totals with the day effect removed (the actual day result divided by the day percent: Actual 56 53 72 75 77

No day effect 55 45 87 93 98

With the second series, I then created a 3-day moving average and an exponential smoothing series with alpha as 0.3, and F4 as the 3-day MA. Day no day effect 3 day MA Expo Smooth, alpha 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 77 54 84 62 62 61 58 59 65 72 67 69 62 60 59 0.3 72 69 67 65 63 62

I then returned the day effect for the last day Forecast method 3 day MA Expo Forecast 58 57 With day effect 70 69 Actual 73 73

Finally, we can use the hour percentage to predict a given hour. For example, the 3-day moving average prediction for arrivals from 13:00 to 14:00 on the last Friday of October would be 70 time hour effect or 70 * .07 = 4.9, which rounded to 5 is the actual arrivals for that time slot.