North Shore University Hospital in New York has initiated some improvement projects in order to accommodate the increasing number of patients. One project involved reducing the turnaround time of pafient-discharge-to-bed-ready process, displayed below.

To study this process, the times between pairs of consecutive steps of the process for 195 patient discharges were computed and plotted (see distributions below). For example, Discharge-bed tracking system (step 1 to step 2) took from 200 to 850 minutes.