Project Hospital is a medical management simulator that gives you the power to design your very own hospital and challenges you to overcome day-to-day obstacles. This guide will go over the starting tips for getting started!
See more game information on Steam here.
1. Build extra Emergency Department Doctor’s Offices
The requirements to start an Emergency Department is very low at just one doctor – but the progress rate from this one office is excruciatingly slow. Build at least 3-4 extra offices to increase capacity for more patients. It is virtually impossible to lose money investing in these offices and so definitely feel free to increase the capacity.
One thing to consider is the number of patients being sent to you currently. Take a look into the investor tab and see the number of patients you have currently – these will increase as you see more patients each day. Increase the number of doctors as needed whenever you see that you have a lot of people waiting in your waiting room throughout the day.
Finally, placing a few intern-level doctors in these offices will also be an easy way to make money since they are fully capable of handling low-difficulty cases.
2. Leave room between clinics for expansion
When more patients show up to your hospital you will end up needing to increase the capacity for each of your clinics. Placing them immediately side-by-side will only result in restricting or fracturing of your clinics.
As soon as you have a basic Emergency Department built, start planning out the rest of your hospital including advanced clinics, ICU, trauma, and staff facilities. Having this blueprint to go by allows you to expand your clinics later on.
General rule of thumb is that the emergency department, radiology, and medical labs will all need a lot of extra development later on due to the role they play in basic patient diagnosis. Radiology development specifically will be crucial due to how many patients need the advanced diagnostic capabilities.
3. Use Pre-Fabricated Rooms to start
These rooms are a great way to get started with the game. It essentially provides you with a modular way to build your hospital without needing to micro-manage the nitpicky details of which rooms require what equipment. Pre-fabricated rooms have everything your doctors and nurses need to diagnose and treat patients along with having a relatively decent aesthetic.
As you become more familiar with the game, you may want to start creating your own pre-fabs or even creating each room from scratch since that is the only way to really make the most out of the space you have. The only downside to this is that you have to really enjoy building things in tiny pieces.
Another benefit to pre-fabricated rooms is that it makes creating blueprints and designing your entire hospital much, much easier. All you have to do is plop down a few rooms/offices, take a look at the number of personnel you will have room for, and then you can have a decent gauge of how much space you need.
4. Build the bare minimum for Radiology and Medical Laboratories first
These departments can be extremely expensive to invest in right at the beginning of the game. Start off with building the basic machines only and invest in more machines later on once you get more notifications that patients are not being diagnosed properly.
As mentioned above regarding space, Radiology and Medical Laboratories are two of the busiest sections in the hospital due to the number of patients that need things like MRI or X-Rays. Make sure to leave lots of room in this area of the hospital for further expansion.
One final note is that these departments should be relatively central to the hospital and near elevators for quick access. These are some of the highest traffic areas and your hospital will benefit from the improved time efficiency.
5. Money comes from treatments, not examinations
Keep this in mind when you set your controls for how sure the doctors have to be of their diagnosis before beginning treatment. In some cases it may cost you a lot more money to get to 100% certainty diagnosis, but in some other cases a misdiagnosis will cause problems with patient satisfaction and hospital prestige.
The key is to hover over the symptoms the patient is experiencing and select the examination that overlaps amongst as many of the symptoms as possible. This ensures that your can make your diagnosis in as few examinations as possible. Depending on your settings, you can also hover over the different possible diagnosis and conduct examinations based on what the differential might be.
Also keep in mind that each doctor has their own ability to diagnose – hiring doctors with better skill will make things more efficient for you. These skills can also be trained once you have built your study room, see #10 for more information.
6. Focus on Insurance Contracts
Insurance contracts are the main method of receiving patients and focusing on their goals will increase how many patients you can receive each day. Focusing on this area will also be a good way for you to learn the game since they tend to advance in a fairly logical method.
Compared to non-insured patients, the insured patients will usually have a higher % boost to how much they pay the hospital – allowing you to expand more services. Developing your hospital in accordance to the contracts early on will help you establish a strong foundation for future progress.
7. Avoid hiring staff with negative perks
Things like having dirty footsteps or having increased needs can make your hospital very inefficient if you do not pay attention to your employees. Avoiding these individuals in the first place will make your life a lot easier compared to having to build new janitorial stations or offices to compensate for staff not working.
That being said, some staff members will also have a positive perk as well (ex. being better at diagnosis) that may offset this negative and so you do have to use your judgement. Ensure that any employee you hire with a negative trait has at least 1 positive trait along with great skill values to justify the hire.
8. Manual Diagnosis and Treatment improves accuracy and efficiency
Selecting manual diagnosis and treatment will place you directly in control of how your doctor examines and treats your patient. As mentioned above, spend time learning the different symptoms and which examination helps clarify the disease state. Moving your mouse over the explanations will help with minimizing resource wastage – especially with things like MRI and X-ray that may be needed by other doctors.
The faster you get to the final diagnosis (with fewest steps taken), the faster you get paid for treatments. Keep in mind that you will also be able to provide treatments for CURRENTLY experienced symptoms as well – meaning that if someone is in pain, you can immediately prescribe them analgesics without having to have the final diagnosis.
The danger with automatic diagnosis is that some unskilled interns may make mistakes and end up misdiagnosing/mistreating the patients. This usually results in patients returning to the hospital with worsening symptoms along with a hit to your hospital prestige. Be very careful when manually diagnosing since poor results can affect the entire hospital.
9. Pay attention to Skill percentage
A doctor’s skill with diagnosing and treating patients plays a huge role in how efficient they are at helping patients. Hiring doctors with great skills is usually more expensive, but definitely worth it for the efficiency and improved hospital prestige.
Most significant of the skills is the ability to diagnose – if the doctor has the ability to do a differential diagnosis then it can drastically reduce chances of a 50-50 situation. Essentially every skill matters in Project Hospital – including those of support staff such as Janitors. Hiring the correct healthcare providers plays a large role in improving prestige, patient satisfaction, and ultimately profit.
One final note is that you should constantly be sending a few of your doctors to study at a time. Over the course of a few days in-game time the improvements in skill will be drastic. See #10 for more information.
10. Build a study room after your first clinic
Usually once you have built your first specialized clinic your hospital will more or less be capable to sustaining several doctors at a time. This is usually a good time to build your study room for improving doctor skill.
One tactic I like to use is to build 1-2 small offices in the Emergency Department and hire fresh interns that are as young as possible. You want these doctors to be trained as your absolute best and hiring them while young ensures that you have lots of time to use them before they retire. As soon as they are hired, bookmark them and constantly send them to study in their basic diagnosis and general medicine skill levels. Over time these will be at a suitable skill for improving their experience very fast.
Even for other more experienced doctors the study room has its benefits. Often times you may have a great diagnostician, but someone who is also an average surgeon. Sending these individuals to develop their skill in surgery will be very beneficial to crafting the perfect team of physicians.
11. Hire a night shift right away
At the start of the game you typically won’t have anything more than the Emergency Department and maybe one specialty clinic. These are very easy to make money off of and setting up a night shift right away gives your doctors the ability to continue helping patients that show up.
Only having the bare minimum for the night shift is usually enough since traffic for the clinics dies down substantially. Once you have unlocked and built wards for hospitalized patients, then make sure you have sufficient nurses in the night shift to prevent complications from arising.
The most important department to have night shift for is Radiology and Medical Laboratories. These departments play a huge role in fast diagnosis and treatment – investing in extra technicians during the night is absolutely worth it.
12. Invest in more beds
Beds are filled up very quickly in Project Hospital. It is extremely important for you to build extra wards and rooms for hospitalized patients since procedures are one of the best methods for making a profit. The result of not having enough beds is that the patients are immediately transferred to another hospital once the doctor determines that hospitalization is required.
This also refers back to #2 where you want to leave lots of room for more beds in each of the clinics that you want to take hospitalized patients for. Having enough room for at least triple your initial number of patients is a good rule of thumb if you intend to continue building your hospital until late game.
Bonus Tip: Create your own Doctor!
Creating your own Doctor allows you to set age, customize appearance, and give 2 positive traits – all for the cost of $10,000. As soon as you create your doctor, you will also obtain access to a great insurance contract that gives you a percentage boost in profits. This absolutely justifies the $10,000 price tag since you will inevitably make it back with your new doctor.
I personally really enjoyed this part of the game since it gives you a bit of role-play potential if you select the doctor as player-controlled. You can end up diagnosing patients very efficiently and very quickly using this new doctor and help them improve their skills fast.
Conclusion
Project Hospital is one of the best medical management games out on the market – and by far the most realistic one. Getting started can be difficult even after finishing the tutorials and I hope that this guide and list of tips has helped you on your journey! 🙂
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