Care Dynamics develops and deploys a comprehensive business process framework for tactical planning of patient flows in healthcare facilities. This approach is unique in its orientation, representing a sharp departure from the classic way of addressing patient logistics.
While the concept of tactical planning in itself is not new – it forms an integral part of decision making in supply chain management across various industries (notably manufacturing, assembly, transportation) – its manifestation in the healthcare sector is, perhaps surprisingly, relatively new. Globally, hospitals tend to excel in long-term and hospital-wide strategic planning; and in short-term (day-to-day), operating-complex driven operational planning. This leaves the gap around patient logistics planning in the tactical horizon (1-3 months) open for improvement.
The new paradigm is based on providing forward visibility for well-defined patient groups along two independent dimensions:
- in time (typically over the coming 1-3 months)
- in space (across the entire hospital supply chain/logistic network)
In the context of the hospital decision-making hierarchy, tactical planning sits between strategic and operational planning: it is designed to steer hospital logistic operations in the direction of the strategic (typically annual) plan, while generating optimal blueprints to initialise the creation (typically in weekly cycles) of the operational plans of the various disciplines.
Building upon state-of-the-art supply chain management and planning techniques used in other industries, the business process methodology implementation services and the decision support technology were worked out and carefully tailored to the specific characteristics of the healthcare system. As such, the new concept optimises (i.e. levels) resource utilisation hospital-wide, leading to reduced queues and waiting-lists while improving economic performance of the hospital and enhancing patient experience.
