At UF Hospital, nurses perform screening of patients to determine the severity of their condition and establish the order in which they should be seen by the doctors. From 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., an average of 18 patients needing this service arrive per hour. Assume Poisson rates and exponential times. George Washington University Hospital is considering the following three options:

Option 1: Three nurses do the screening, separately. Each nurse averages 7 minutes with a patient.

Option 2: Four medical assistants do the screening, separately. Each one has an average service time of 12 minutes.

Option 3: One nurse and two medical assistants work as a team with an average service time of 3 minutes.

The nurses are paid $50.00 per hour, the medical assistants are paid $35 an hour, and the patient time in the screening area is valued at $60.00 an hour.

a) Which system (option) would you recommend?

Note/Hint: This task required to compute total cost of waiting. While computing total cost consider number of servers and the most appropriate queuing operating characteristic(s). Following is the hint to find total cost: