Operations management techniques for resource optimization in health care structures

This paper focuses on the identification of improvement opportunities through process analysis inside sanitary services, and the case of the radiology department of a primary public hospital in Rome is reported. At first, an exhaustive study of the internal processes in the analysed department was performed in order to identify bottlenecks and service level loss causes. Secondly, in order to gain a better resource exploitation and to increase the department productivity, a method for optimizing resource management through patient scheduling and shift management was identified: patients have been divided among inpatients (already hospitalized) and outpatients (who are admitted to the hospital just for the exam and do not require an overnight stay) and a higher resource utilization has been reached leveraging on a flexible management of the formers preparation. Moreover, service lead times have been analysed with reference to patient characteristics and exam typology and, basing on the classification of exams, the patient scheduling is solved with a linear programming approach. The methodology does not include the application of state-of-art Operations Management techniques and, for an industrial context, it may appear extremely simple; however, as far as the optimization of sanitary services is concerned, the adoption of the described criteria has demonstrated that increases in service capacity and reductions of the overtime for physicians and nurses are easily reachable. This analysis has anyway required an appropriate statistical investigation on time variability per each exam typology in the radiology department on top of a deep understanding of the several complex processes inside the hospital system. The criteria can be straightforward extended to different departments, or applied in the radiology departments of other hospitals for a comparative analysis, as is already planned for the next step of the research.