Jan Van Mieghem

When a person arrives at the emergency room complaining of shortness of breath, they’ll likely be sent for a chest X-ray. Then they’ll probably need to sit and wait to be seen by a doctor—sometimes for a while. Instead of treating patients on a first-come, first-served basis, the U.S. healthcare system typically relies on a triage process whereby clinicians assign patients a preliminary diagnosis to decide where to place them in the queue.

Problem definition: Collaboration is important in services but may lead to interruptions. Professionals exercise discretion on when to preempt individual tasks to switch to collaborative tasks. Academic/practical relevance: Discretionary task switching can introduce changeover times when resuming the preempted task and, thus, can increase total processing time. Methodology: We analyze and quantify how collaboration, through interruptions and discretionary changeovers, affects total processing time.