Dynamic Capacity Management For Healthcare

While hospitals can learn from other industries, they cannot be improved or run like factories. With work that is more individualized than standardized, and limited control over volume and arrivals, even the leanest-minded hospital must recognize that healthcare systems are more dynamic than nearly any work environment.Written with the creativity n

Hospital Capacity Management: Insights and Strategies details many of the key processes, procedures, and administrative realities that make up the healthcare system we all encounter when we visit the ED or the hospital. It walks through, in detail, how these systems work, how they came to be this way, why they are set up as they are, and then, in many cases, why and how they should be improved right now. Many examples pulled from the lifelong experiences of the authors, published studies, and well-documented case studies are provided, both to illustrate and support arguments for change. First and foremost, it is necessary to remember that the mission of our healthcare system is to take care of patients. This has been forgotten at times, causing many of the issues the authors discuss in the book including hospital capacity management. This facet of healthcare management is absolutely central to the success or failure of a hospital, both in terms of its delivery of care and its ability to survive as an institution. Poor hospital capacity management is a root cause of long wait times, overcrowding, higher error rates, poor communication, low satisfaction, and a host of other commonly experienced problems. It is important enough that when it is done well, it can completely transform an entire hospital system. Hospital capacity management can be described as optimizing a hospital’s bed availability to provide enough capacity for efficient, error-free patient evaluation, treatment, and transfer to meet daily demand. A hospital that excels at capacity management is easy to spot: no lines of people waiting and no patients in hallways or sitting around in chairs. These hospitals don’t divert incoming ambulances to other hospitals; they have excellent patient safety records and efficiently move patients through their organization. They exist but are sadly in the minority of American hospitals. The vast majority are instead forced to constantly react to their own poor performance. This often results in the building of bigger and bigger institutions, which, instead of managing capacity, simply create more space in which to mismanage it. These institutions are failing to resolve the true stumbling blocks to excellent patient care, many of which you may have experienced firsthand in your own visit to your hospital. It is the hope of the authors that this book will provide a better understanding of the healthcare delivery system.

Our nation's capacity to care is becoming increasingly stressed as an aging and increasingly unhealthy population collides with a relative reduction in the numbers of clinicians and ever-tightening financial resources. If even the mildest of future-state predictions are to be believed, we need a significant restructuring of our entire healthcare system and its total Capacity to Care, such that we can simultaneously improve care capacity, cost, quality, accessibility, and resource gratification. Optimizing Your Capacity to Care: A Systems Approach to Hospital and Population Health Management provides comprehensive guidance to a new way to optimize and manage community-wide Care Capacity via a unique, holistic approach to healthcare operations. Through clear examples and actual project results, the book demonstrates the outcomes of a systems-level way of thinking about a community's Capacity to Care that incorporates and integrates the full spectrum of available clinical and communal resources into the care of patients, including hospitals, physicians, emergency departments, surgical services, local churches, civic organizations, pharmacies, and volunteers. The book details operational models for each major department of the hospital and a fully integrated communal resource pool to demonstrate how the optimization of capacity, resource utilization, cost, and clinical outcomes can be attained. And by providing healthcare leaders with a deeper understanding of key elements missing from the most common process improvement methodologies and approaches, this book offers fresh perspectives and bold alternatives for hospitals, health systems, and entire communities.

Although much has been achieved in care coordination and accountable care, healthcare leaders need additional, game-changing innovations to deal with constraints in clinical resources, care capacity, and cost that have not yet been fully addressed. This need for innovation is especially great in the care of the chronically ill: the most costly, hig

From the Preface: Collectively, the chapters in this book address application domains including inpatient and outpatient services, public health networks, supply chain management, and resource constrained settings in developing countries. Many of the chapters provide specific examples or case studies illustrating the applications of operations research methods across the globe, including Africa, Australia, Belgium, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Chapters 1-4 review operations research methods that are most commonly applied to health care operations management including: queuing, simulation, and mathematical programming. Chapters 5-7 address challenges related to inpatient services in hospitals such as surgery, intensive care units, and hospital wards. Chapters 8-10 cover outpatient services, the fastest growing part of many health systems, and describe operations research models for primary and specialty care services, and how to plan for patient no-shows. Chapters 12 – 16 cover topics related to the broader integration of health services in the context of public health, including optimizing the location of emergency vehicles, planning for mass vaccination events, and the coordination among different parts of a health system. Chapters 17-18 address supply chain management within hospitals, with a focus on pharmaceutical supply management, and the challenges of managing inventory for nursing units. Finally, Chapters 19-20 provide examples of important and emerging research in the realm of humanitarian logistics.

This book demonstrates how to successfully manage and lead healthcare institutions by employing the logic of business model innovation to gain competitive advantages. Since clerk-like routines in professional organizations tend to overlook patient and service-centered healthcare solutions, it challenges the view that competition and collaboration in the healthcare sector should not only incorporate single-end services, therapies or diagnosis related groups. Moreover, the authors focus on holistic business models, which place greater emphasis on customer needs and put customers and patients first. The holistic business models approach addresses topics such as business operations, competitiveness, strategic business objectives, opportunities and threats, critical success factors and key performance indicators.The contributions cover various aspects of service business innovation such as reconfiguring the hospital business model in healthcare delivery, essential characteristics of service business model innovation in healthcare, guided business modeling and analysis for business professionals, patient-driven service delivery models in healthcare, and continuous and co-creative business model creation. All of the contributions introduce business models and strategies, process innovations, and toolkits that can be applied at the managerial level, ensuring the book will be of interest to healthcare professionals, hospital managers and consultants, as well as scholars, whose focus is on improving value-generating and competitive business architectures in the healthcare sector.

Non-value adding activities are otherwise known as ‘waste’ in the lean construction lexicon. The aim of this collection is to build a common understanding of the role and contribution of value-adding activities in achieving stipulated objectives and continuous improvement in construction projects, and to contrast this with waste. Although the lean approach to construction projects has been widely covered, this is the first book that explicitly provides the link between value and waste in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector. This internationally researched collection seeks to create a paradigm shift, which will shape work processes and future directions for how value is conceptualized and operationalized in both the project management and business aspects of construction. The readers will gain an understanding of: The value-adding paradigm in construction How to make value-supporting decisions Waste identification and control in practice With contributions from South Africa, Brazil, Norway, and the USA, the implications of this book are globally relevant. This is essential reading for all higher level students of construction management and economics, and all professionals interested in value management.

This proceedings volume highlights the state-of-the-art knowledge related to optimization, decisions science and problem solving methods, as well as their application in industrial and territorial systems. It includes contributions tackling these themes using models and methods based on continuous and discrete optimization, network optimization, simulation and system dynamics, heuristics, metaheuristics, artificial intelligence, analytics, and also multiple-criteria decision making. The number and the increasing size of the problems arising in real life require mathematical models and solution methods adequate to their complexity. There has also been increasing research interest in Big Data and related challenges. These challenges can be recognized in many fields and systems which have a significant impact on our way of living: design, management and control of industrial production of goods and services; transportation planning and traffic management in urban and regional areas; energy production and exploitation; natural resources and environment protection; homeland security and critical infrastructure protection; development of advanced information and communication technologies. The chapters in this book examine how to deal with new and emerging practical problems arising in these different fields through the presented methodologies and their applications. The chapter topics are applicable for researchers and practitioners working in these areas, but also for the operations research community. The contributions were presented during the international conference “Optimization and Decision Science” (ODS2017), held at Hilton Sorrento Palace Conference Center, Sorrento, Italy, September 4 – 7, 2017. ODS 2017, was organized by AIRO, Italian Operations Research Society, in cooperation with DIETI (Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology) of University “Federico II” of Naples.