Title: Daily capacity management for hospitals: a Brazilian case study

Authors: Otavio Bittencourt; Vedat Verter; Morty Yalovsky

Addresses: Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre (UFCSPA), Rua Sarmento Leite, 245 – Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, CEP 90050-170, Brazil ' Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1G5, Canada ' Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1G5, Canada

Abstract: In the short-term, the main challenge for hospitals is to employ their facility capacities efficiently, but relatively little attention has been paid to monitoring of daily operations. We propose a dashboard that is designed to measure the hospital performance on a daily basis, based on the input-throughput-output conceptual model, related to admissions, capacity, and discharges. Empirical data from a Brazilian university hospital is utilised to demonstrate how to deploy the performance indicators, revealing improvements in admission and capacity management. The dashboard supports decisions such as the number of patients to be admitted, the expected number of discharges, provides a more acute measure of bed occupancy, a trend indicator of length of stay, and it allows to tune the daily arrival rate and throughput. We advocate that there is room for improvement by implementing a set of daily operational performance indicators.

Keywords: daily capacity management; university hospitals; healthcare management; Brazil; case study; input-throughput-output conceptual models; patient admission; patient discharge; discharge decisions; operational capacity; lean healthcare; healthcare planning; healthcare control; daily indicator dashboard; performance indicators; bed occupancy; length of stay; operational performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2017.083342

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2017 Vol.27 No.1, pp.102 - 121

Received: 18 Jul 2015
Accepted: 24 Oct 2015
Published online: 24 Mar 2017 *

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