Theme Hospital Clinic: Research

A decent research facility helps a hospital do it's job better, cure more patients, and bring in more cash into your coffers. On later levels it is essential they are well managed as they are the only means you have of developing the special cure and diagnosis rooms you need. 

Following this course of treatment you should be able to manage your research with ease, getting the most from the boys in the back room.

Research fields Where, why, and who Priorities

There are five areas which you can research. You have to build a research room before you can set your research priorities, and you need at least one doctor with a research qualification to run it. 

The five areas of research are: 

• Cure equipment
• Diagnosis equipment
• Drug research
• Improvements
• Specialization

Researching cure equipment gives you the rooms for diseases that require special machines. On early levels there will be only one or two rooms to research, later on there will be up to 5 or 6. A priority placed here will allow you to cure more patients that have been fully diagnosed, without having to turn them away in the early stages of the level. 

When you aren't sure what disease a patient has then they will have to go to another diagnosis room. Priority on this research area will give you more ways of finding out what is wrong with a patient (and so charging them more money!) On early levels there will be one or two rooms to research, later there will be up to 5 or 6 items to be researched. Enhancements to the research room (computer and atom analyzer) are also researched under this topic. 

Drug research improves the effectiveness of a pharmacy drug cure. Very important on later levels where you will kill more than one patient because of low effectiveness. Each improvement is in a small increment for an individual drug. When you have cures less than 75% then all the drugs will be improved until they are at 75% or higher. After that the lowest drug in the casebook will be improved until it reaches 100%. 

Improvements make your machines last longer (cure or diagnose more patients before needing repair). They also reduce the cost of building/replacing a machine room once the maximum strength has been achieved. 

Specialization is the only way of directing research to look at one specific cure and improve it. Useful when you have a particular machine that has a low initial strength, or a cure you want to obtain in a hurry.

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Building a research room at the start of the level is probably the best thing you can do. Making it as large as possible will make the research proceed that much more quickly. It can be placed out of the way as there is only one reason for patients to visit (and they don't leave!) 

Try and place at least one good doctor in the room (consultant is always best, or a doctor with skill > 50%). More than one doctor will reduce research times, this becomes essential when there is a great deal to research.

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Getting the right balance of priorites is the key here, your needs will depend on what stage of the hospital construction you are on. 
 

Early in the level

It is more important to build up the number of cure and diagnosis rooms that you have. You should not research these rooms so quickly that you don't have the money to build them.

Although cure rooms are useful as they have higher charges, not having enough diagnosis rooms prevents you from sending a patient to be cured. It is suggested that you install a new diagnosis room before a new cure room, however there is a strategy that helps you bypass this and concentrate on cure rooms first.

Higher levels have pharmacy cures with less than 100% effectiveness. By channelling effort into drug research you can improve some of these cures while you have only a few illnesses discovered. 
 

Mid-term priorities

Once you have most or all of the cure rooms you should reduce research priority in this area and concentrate more on getting your drugs up to 100% efficiency. By this stage you should have quite a few illnesses on your casebook that require potions from the pharmacy, so a concentrated research effort is required. 

You can also bump up the improvements category a little as you will find that some machines require frequent replacement (the Jelly Vat in particular). Your hospital becomes more effective in the long term as hardware depreciates less. 
 

Long term interests

Once your drug research has maxed out your drug efficiency, there is only one thing left to concentrate on: Improvements. When the strength of the machine has been maximized this category will start reducing the replacement cost. This feeds back into the cost to build a new room as well, but by this stage you are usually raking it in anyway...right?

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