Restricting a Radiology Room to a Department

Hi, I've been playing the game for several months now.

I realized that when radiology is concerned, the AI routing is quite terrible at choosing radiological examination room. For example, a patient from Trauma Center ended up being transported half a map across to get X-ray exam - despite that there's a free X-ray room right next to the TC. To add on top of that, the X-ray room near the TC is rarely used, and when it does, it's often being used to exam patients from a further ward. It seems that distance is not really considered by the AI at all. This led to patients collapsing or dying because they can't get examed and treated in a timely manner.

I think that fixing the routing might create more unforeseen problems for some people, but the alternative could be an option to restrict a radiology room to a particular department. For example, since there's already an option to restrict an X-ray room for clinic/hospitalized patients, by allowing players to restrict the radiology room to Emergency Department while having the hospitalized patient-only checked, you're effectively allowing only TC patients to be examed in the X-ray room closest to the TC. Similarly, you can check off the Emergency Department from X-ray room on the opposite side of the map so that TC patients will not be transported half a map across while allowing patients from other departments to use the said room.

Is there's anything you can do to tackle with this relatively well-known problem?

Hi, thanks for the message and the suggestion! We can definitely discuss this with the designers - some ways to have more control over the radiology rooms could be helpful in these specific cases, although this wouldn't be a small change (there's a lot of functionality connected to room/staff selection). One possibility would be to use the employee roles system, radiologists can be already set to only work with clinic/hospitalized patients, so a couple more specific roles could be the solution.

My opinion the best way to handle this is to add a room management window to allow users to select what department has access to this room such as the Trama Center.  The Radiologist assigned to the room comes from the department selected.

I would love to see this issue being kept in business.

Pathfinding (especially to the radiology department) is quite an issue still to be done.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the game right now. When a patient needs an X-Ray or CT or any kind of diagnostic imaging, the game will select the nearest room that is currently free.  So if you have an X-Ray room close to your Emergency Department but the technologist is currently "filling needs" or "returning to workplace" it wont count the room as free. Instead, the game will assign the patient to the next nearest room with an "idle" technologist. Unfortunately this means a lot of patients are often sent to imaging facilities half way across the map. This is incredibly frustrating when they're collapsing with hidden symptoms and they end up in the ICU or dying trying to make the round trip back.

The current work around for me is to hire technologists with the 'hard working' trait. So even when they're idle, they wont randomly walk to the common room to "fill free time"; they'll stay put and on call. Other important work arounds are to make sure each X-Ray is super close to a toilet and a common room. The less further away a technologist has to walk to fill needs, the less down time you have in your radiology department.

Still though, we should have more control. This is in my humble opinion the biggest issue with the game right now and I would love it if the devs made it their top priority for an upcoming patch.