Daily capacity management for hospitals: a Brazilian case study

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.