Our Approach

Our main goal is to facilitate wider adoption of scientific management practices in healthcare. One major impediment to wider adoption of traditional operations management (OM) methodologies is artificial variability in patient flow driven by inappropriate scheduling practices. In order to enable the application of traditional OM methodologies such as queuing modeling and simulation in healthcare, the faculty of the Institute for Healthcare Optimization developed an approach to managing variability in patient flow, as well as a package of services branded as IHO Variability Methodology^®. Together, OM and management of patient flow variability offer a range of tools for healthcare operations design and patient flow management. Select examples of application include

• scheduling and operations design for operating rooms, cardiac catheterization labs, radiology, outpatient clinics, and so on
• emergency room operational and staffing design
• inpatient unit sizing and staffing
• facility design and capacity planning for new construction projects
• management of patient transfer into and out of a healthcare facility
• integrated health system design including transfers from hospitals to post-acute settings such as rehabilitation and skilled nursing facilities