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Background: Process of discharging patients affects patient’s satisfaction .This is one of the serious challenges that hospital managers face. This study is aimed to determine the average waiting time of patient discharge process and identify influential factors of this process in Imam Reza Hospital in Mashhad in the year of 2014.

Materials & Methods: This is a cross-sectional survey in which waiting time of patients who had discharged from clinical wards of the Imam Reza hospital in Mashhad had been studied. 455 of patients had been selected as samples. The amount of  time spent during discharge in six different departments  such as inside each ward, from each ward to the medical records unit, inside the medical records unit, from medical records unit to  accounting department , during cost calculation and also from  cost accounting to cost payment unit) had been determined by using stop-watch method. The data had been analyzed by descriptive and analytical statistics in significant level of 0.05  using SPSS16.

Results: Results showed that waiting time was 504.26± 362.96 Minutes. Patients spent most and least proportion of their waiting time in ENT and Burns wards during discharge.

Conclusion:   As noticeable number of minutes spent inside wards and cost payment unit by patients, calls for corrective interventions such as changing visit time and predicting schedules for sending medical record to accounting department could  reduce waiting time.

Background: Enhancing the need for health care services and its related costs, lead hospitals to improve and organize their processes. The aim of current study was to assess the Patients' Hospitalization and Discharge Processes Based on Kaizen approach and Multiple-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) in an internal ward of one Hospital.

Materials and Methods: In this descriptive analytical study, ten managers completed the hospitalization and discharge questionnaires and answered three open questions according to Kaizen principles. Then, satisfaction score was measured for 100 patients using a reliable questionnaire (α=0.93). At third phase, after evaluating the proposed solutions using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the managers prioritized them based on cost, time and effectiveness considering indicators.

Results: Study findings revealed that mean scores of activity in hospitalization and discharge processes were 88.52 and 90.33 (out of 100) respectively, which showed high conformity with Kaizen approach. Also, mean scores of hospitalization and discharge satisfaction which indicated desirable satisfaction were 76.75 and 78.6 (out of 100), respectively. Based on managers' view points, results of MCDM and AHP methods indicated that effectiveness was the most important indicator and time as well as cost gained next priorities for solutions implementation.

Conclusion: This study showed that although, hospitalization and discharge processes were relatively desirable in the internal ward in mentioned hospitals, it is still a necessary to seek the best solutions in terms of effectiveness, time and cost for patients' satisfaction.