Analytical Techniques to Support Hospital Case Mix Planning
This work addresses hospital capacity planning for healthcare administrators, but it is incremental as it builds on existing approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of hospital capacity assessment and case mix planning by developing an optimization model and multi-objective decision-making techniques, resulting in a decision support tool that reports metrics and impacts of case mix modifications.
This article introduces analytical techniques and a decision support tool to support capacity assessment and case mix planning (CMP) approaches previously created for hospitals. First, an optimization model is proposed to analyse the impact of making a change to an existing case mix. This model identifies how other patient types should be altered proportionately to the changing levels of hospital resource availability. Then we propose multi-objective decision-making techniques to compare and critique competing case mix solutions obtained. The proposed techniques are embedded seamlessly within an Excel Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) personal decision support tool (PDST), for performing informative quantitative assessments of hospital capacity. The PDST reports informative metrics of difference and reports the impact of case mix modifications on the other types of patient present. The techniques developed in this article provide a bridge between theory and practice that is currently missing and provides further situational awareness around hospital capacity.