Integral Capacity Management & Planning in Hospitals

Care pathways in hospitals usually encompass multiple resources and healthcare pro- fessionals. This makes managing hospital processes and capacities challenging. To prevent myopic optimization, process improvements should consider multiple steps in care pathways.

This dissertation aims to improve complex decision-making that in- tegrally manages capacity for care pathways. Operations research may play a crucial role by analyzing such capacity decisions in a safe environment before actual imple- mentation. However, despite the vast amount of available research and its potential, it appears that the actual implementation of operations research models and results in healthcare practice is rarely described in the literature. This is surprising, as imple- mentation is the ultimate step in realizing improvement. We try to improve this final step by distinguishing two approaches: (1) organizing the timing and alignment of the optimal decisions among related capacities and (2) analyzing (near) optimal capacity decisions considering multiple capacities.

This research creates impact in practice through implementing research outcomes and analyzing the effects of interventions in the Leiden University Medical Center.