A framework for health care planning and control

Rising expenditures spur health care organizations to organize their processes more efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, health care planning and control lags far behind manufacturing planning and control. Successful manufacturing planning and control concepts can not be directly copied, because of the unique nature of health care delivery. We analyze existing planning and control concepts or frameworks for health care operations management, and find that they do not properly 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 health care planning and control. Our framework integrates all managerial areas involved in health care 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 broadly, to an individual department, an entire health care 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. We illustrate the application of the framework with examples.