Patient Flow: Reducing Delay in Healthcare Delivery

Patient Flow: Reducing Delay in Healthcare Delivery is dedicated to improving healthcare through reducing the delays experienced by patients. One aspect of this goal is to improve the flow of patients, so that they do not experience unnecessary waits as they flow through a healthcare system. Another aspect is ensuring that services are closely synchronized with patterns of patient demand. Still another aspect is ensuring that ancillary services, such as housekeeping and transportation, are fully coordinate with direct patient care. It is the first book treatment to have reduction in patient delay as its sole focus, and therefore, provides the foundation by which hospitals can implement change. Reflecting the highly interdisciplinary and practitioner nature of this book, the chapters have been written by doctors, nurses, industrial engineers, system engineers and geographers, and thus, these perspectives provide the comprehensive view needed to address the problem of patient delay.

• capacity management
• care program
• clinical facilities
• demand-capacity management
• discrete-event simulation
• health care system
• hospital flow
• hospital process
• medical consequences
• medical supplies
• patient appointments
• patients
• primary care
• safety
• scheduling

From the reviews:

"A comprehensive multiauthored manual that outlines the techniques and methods that can be applied to the health care system to improve patient flow, reduce patient delays, and improve overall health care. ... Many examples are illustrated to enhance learning. ... Recommended Readership: Physicians involved with the management of the practice or in leadership roles, office and hospital administrators or managers, and quality improvement champions." (Mark A. Nyman, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Vol. 82 (3), March, 2007)

"This book, which contains 15 papers on the operational aspects of health-care delivery, was written by doctors, nurses, industrial engineers, and operations research professionals … . Those of us who are deeply interested in the application of management principles and technologies to health-care delivery will be delighted to receive this book. … it will also serve to alert health administrators worldwide that a science has grown up to solve the operational problems in health-care delivery, and that they should be using it in their organizations." (Jamshed A. Modi, Interfaces, Vol. 37 (5), 2007)

• Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

  Randolph W. Hall

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