A Framework for Healthcare Planning and Control

Abstract

Rising expenditures spur healthcare organizations to organize their processes more efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, healthcare planning and control lags behind manufacturing planning and control. We analyze existing planning and control concepts or frameworks for healthcare operations management and find that they do not address various important planning and control problems. We conclude that they only focus on hospitals and are too narrow, focusing on a single managerial area, such as resource capacity planning, or ignoring hierarchical levels. We propose a modern framework for healthcare planning and control that integrates all managerial areas in healthcare delivery operations and all hierarchical levels of control, to ensure completeness and coherence of responsibilities for every managerial area. The framework can be used to structure the various planning and control functions and their interaction. It is applicable to an individual department, an entire healthcare organization, and to a complete supply chain of cure and care providers. The framework can be used to identify and position various types of managerial problems, to demarcate the scope of organization interventions and to facilitate a dialogue between clinical staff and managers.

ORchestra: an online reference database of OR/MS literature in health care

“…The medical topics are derived from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) [5]. In addition, references are classified in the hierarchical levels of strategic, tactical, of f line operational and online operational planning [2].…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…These hierarchical levels and the managerial area of resource capacity planning and control form the basis for our taxonomy. For the hierarchical levels, [234] applies the well-known breakdown of strategic, tactical and operational [9]. In addition, the operational level is subdivided in offline and online decision making, where offline reflects the in advance decision making and online the real-time reactive decision making in response to events that cannot be planned in advance.…”

“…Planning and control has a rich tradition in manufacturing [234]. Due to the increase in demand and expenditure for healthcare [384], planning and control in healthcare has received a growing amount of attention over the last ten years, both in practice and in the literature.…”

“…Within these research efforts, planning and control is a key focal area -the subject of more than 35% of the ORAHS publications [61]. INFORMS organized the first conference on healthcare in 2009, presenting over 400 abstracts in a variety of OR healthcare topics [234]. The growing attention for resource capacity planning and control in healthcare contributes to further closing the gap with planning and control in manufacturing.…”

“…The growing attention for resource capacity planning and control in healthcare contributes to further closing the gap with planning and control in manufacturing. Common reasons stated in the literature for the fact that this gap exists include [234]:…”