Suppose that you are hired to analyze a hospital system and make recommendations with the objective of
improving the operations and service quality. There are several departments that are part of this full-service
hospital. However, in this project you will mainly focus on the emergency department (ED). The other
departments include Imaging, Lab, and Surgery, all of which provide service to the ED as well as to the rest
of the hospital. Clearly, the patients in ED compete with those from other departments; for example, hospital
inpatients may also need imaging diagnostics. However, this study assumes that a certain number of
resources are allocated to the ED; this assumption can be relaxed when the model also incorporates the
operations of other departments (which are outside the scope of this project).