Operations Management in Healthcare – principles for creating swift even patient flow and increased accessibility

Paper in proceeding, 2012

This paper investigates the operations management principles that potentially could be transferred to healthcare in order to improve care production processes, i.e. ensuring a swift even flow of patients through the healthcare unit. The discussion and the conclusion from this study are based on qualitative case studies in planned and unplanned healthcare operations, in a large university hospital in Sweden. Given how much we know about the ways in which healthcare could be improved, the efforts devoted trying out different approaches would seem to question why more has not been done to solve the many problems in this sector. Rather than concentrating debate and discussion on the differences with industry, we should concentrate on the similarities with healthcare and draw on the potential for mutual learning between contexts which might facilitate a creative process and identify solutions that would result in swift, even patient flows.