Integrated Planning in Hospitals: Complexity, Analytics, Reorganization, Efficiency

A well-performing health care system is one of the most important factors for the prosperity and well-being of a society. In that context, hospitals serve as one of the key providers of health care services. Efficient service provision and, thereby, high-quality health care requires the necessary resources such as personnel and beds to be dimensioned correctly and to be available in the right place at the right time. Typically, resource-related planning problems are treated separately for each resource without integrated planning across several resources. This leads to globally sub-optimal decisions and unused potential for high quality health care services. Moreover, these problems are often dealt with by clinical staff who are not trained for this kind of complex decisions. This reduces their available time for patient treatment and care.

The DFG-funded scientific network InPlan-CARE aims to develop a holistic view on integrated planning problems in health care, particularly identifying state-of-the art research and analyzing the complexity of existing problems in hospitals. Secondly, advanced quantitative methods to support decision making for integrated planning in hospitals will be developed. In collaboration with hospitals, these models will be thoroughly evaluated in order to assess their suitability for real life application. Finally, this network aims to generate awareness for the necessity of integrated planing among hospital practitioners and within the wider research community – especially strengthening interdisciplinary research. The scientific network connects junior researchers from Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom. All of them have significant expertise in the area of health care management and quantitative planning. Specific research questions addressing the objectives of the project will be discussed during workshops and topic-specific meetings. Talks at national and international conferences and publications in peer-reviewed journals will ensure suitable dissemination of the obtained results.