When Maria Rodriguez walks into the Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Brunswick these days, her bloodwork is processed within 30 minutes, and she’s seated in an infusion chair before her coffee cools. Just two years ago, that same journey could take three hours. The transformation began not with construction crews or new hires, but with a digital twin—a virtual replica of the clinic built inside a computer by researchers from Rutgers Cancer Institute and Rutgers Business School. Using data from over 200 daily patient visits, the team mapped every step of care, from check-in to check-out, and simulated thousands of workflow changes without disrupting a single real-world appointment. What they found surprised them: adding more nurses barely moved the needle. The real delays were systemic—off-site lab testing that took 90 minutes to return results and a single, tangled queue where a patient needing a 20-minute blood draw waited behind someone scheduled for an eight-hour infusion. The solution? Bring lab processing onsite and create a ‘fast track’ for supportive care. The changes were simple in concept but powerful in effect. Within months, the clinic nearly doubled its daily infusion capacity from 50 to 80 patients, reduced lab turnaround by more than 60 minutes, and cut average visit times by up to 90 minutes—even as patient volume grew. 'The multistep process for oncology patients exists at every cancer center in the country, if not the world,' says Dr. Andrew Evens, deputy director for clinical services at Rutgers Cancer Institute and senior author of the study published in the Annals of Operations Research. The digital twin didn’t just optimize a clinic—it revealed a blueprint for smarter healthcare design. With the fast track now permanently embedded in clinic operations and the model drawing interest from hospitals nationwide, the team believes this approach could reshape how care flows through emergency departments, surgical units, and outpatient clinics everywhere. In a field where time is often measured in survival, the most powerful treatment might just be efficiency.