An Orthopedics and Spine Center clinic strives to provide their patients with high-quality care and uses the Press Ganey survey to measure a patient's satisfaction during his/her stay at the clinic.The Press Ganey scores are benchmarked against other orthopedic clinics around the United States.The clinic’s goal is to be within the top 50% of all orthopedic clinics that use this survey to measure patient satisfaction. Currently the clinic meets this goal only 22% of the time. A main contributor to poor patient satisfaction scores is the amount of time patients spend waiting in the clinic. Currently, patients experience an average wait time of 34 minutes during their visit, which makes up almost 60% of the total visit.

A major problem that has been identified is back-ups in the X-ray process. These delays cause physicians to wait for patients to return from the x-ray process. When the physicians fall behind, the patients then must spend more time waiting for the physicians to catch up. How can the clinic run more efficiently and minimize patient wait time and physician’s delay? Should they implement a process that anticipates demand on x-ray process and schedules patients around x-ray’s capacity? Should they add more capacity to the x-ray process?