Hospital capacity planning: from measuring stocks to modelling flows

Hospital capacity planning: from measuring stocks to modelling flows.

The metric of "bed numbers" is commonly used in hospital planning, but it fails to capture key aspects of how hospital services are delivered. Drawing on a study of innovative hospital projects in Europe, we argue that hospital capacity planning should not be based on beds, but rather on the ability to deliver processes. We propose using approaches that are based on manufacturing theory such as...

PLANNING FOR MOVEMENT : Measuring and Modelling Pedestrian Flows in Cities

Incorporating Efficiency in Hospital Capacity Planning: Experience from Germany

Objective. The hospital occupancy rate is a key metric in hospital capacity planning, despite the fact that this metric neglects economic efficiency and offers the abnormal incentive to artificially increase the length-of-stay with detrimental effect on medical and economic performance. We suggest a modification of the occupancy metric to alleviate these shortcomings. The resulting metric incor...

Data Envelopment Analysis Improves Hospital Capacity Planning

We report on an application of data envelopment analysis to hospital capacity planning in Germany. This work was carried out as part of a ministry report prepared by a major German health care consulting company. Our input into this report is a first attempt to incorporate the relative economic efficiency of hospitals into the capacity planning process. The application develops a general approa...

Inferring Migration Flows from Birthplace-Specific Population Stocks

Demographic estimation in countries with well-developed data reporting systems is based on data collected by censuses and vital registration systems. In countries with inadequate or inaccurate data reporting systems, demographic estimation often must rely on methods that are “indirect”. Such methods have been applied with considerable success in studies of mortality and fertility, but they have...