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.