Not to make light of his work, but this is not that novel. Students have been "improving" the medical field using queuing theory and simulation software for ye

Not to make light of his work, but this is not that novel. Students have been "improving" the medical field using queuing theory and simulation software for years . I did it in my stochastics class when I got my master's degree in Operations Research. The key translation from the article is "Xu emphasizes that the work is still ongoing" which means that isn't implemented [yet] and the 40 minute savings are just computer estimates. What I would really like to see is an article titled, "Huge real-world increases in medical efficiency directly attributed to student's work and now saves hundreds of lives per year" -- or something like that. I'm not very good at creating titles. Again, I want to emphasize that I don't want to make light of Mr. Xu's work (stochastics might be my least favorite subject and gets complicated when you create detailed models) and I wish him luck as he pursues his PhD.