Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a structured review of the state of the art in OR/MS

Abstract

We provide a comprehensive overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a structured review of relevant articles from the field of Operations Research and Management Sciences (OR/MS) for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making.

ORchestra: an online reference database of OR/MS literature in health care

“…In [3] a taxonomy is proposed that incorporates the aforementioned hierarchical planning levels to support and integrate decision making in resource capacity planning and control in health care. This taxonomy is used to identify, break down and classify these de-cisions.…”

“…An other CHOIR survey reviews OR/MS literature to determine the extent to which model scopes encompass multiple hospital departments [8]. All articles referred in [3,8] are included in ORchestra.…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…The quality of decisions in each care service depends on the information available from and the restrictions imposed by other care services [263]. As such, patient care pathways connect multiple departments and resources together as an integrated network.…”

“…The authors conclude that the lack of models for complete healthcare processes still existed. Although a body of literature focusing on two-departmental interactions was identified, very few contributions were found on complete hospital interactions, let alone on complete healthcare system interactions [263].…”

“…The Center for Healthcare Operations Improvement and Research (CHOIR) of the University of Twente has introduced and maintains the online literature database 'ORchestra' [262,383], in which references in the field of OR/MS in healthcare are categorized by medical and mathematical subject. All the articles mentioned in Chapter 3 are categorized in ORchestra [263].…”