An Integrated Approach for Healthcare Systems Management in India

Abstract

The healthcare sector is one of the fastest growing areas of national importance worldwide. Healthcare system is complex involving large number of stakeholders with diversified requirements coupled with resource constraints in the sociotechnical context of a country. The performance of healthcare system needs to be continuously improved in order to increase the reachability and affordability of the medical services to the people. It is possible only when an integrated approach is adopted for healthcare management. This paper aims at addressing a number of critical problems affecting the performance in three major dimensions of a healthcare system: its ability to become accessible to the entire population of a country (availability), its ability to become affordable by the entire population (affordability), and its ability to provide quality services to all the stakeholders (quality). Four basic principles viz., system orientation, person centeredness, design driven improvement, and data-driven decision making are adopted. A few research areas that are highlighted in this paper are (i) resource scheduling, capacity planning, economies of scale, hospital inventory management, waste management, (ii) performance measurement and evaluation schemes for different kinds of services, (iii) ergonomic design of healthcare facilities and jobs, design of interventions for management of job stress of healthcare professionals, (iv) development of healthcare quality management system, (v) development of geospatial healthcare data models, modeling disease spread networks for predicting patterns of disease and its severity across geographies, (vi) development of healthcare decision support systems, and (vii) healthcare analytics. In this paper, a number of critical issues affecting the performance of Indian healthcare system have been addressed with the objective of designing a comprehensive framework for healthcare performance improvement.