Productivity improvement in heart surgery – a case study on care process development

Abstract

The need to improve quality and productivity in health care is great. The usefulness of production and inventory management techniques is largely unexplored. In this case study from a university hospital in Finland, it is learnt how a change in queuing system for open heart surgery from a single first-in-first-out queue to a double-queue scheduling system can radically increase available capacity. The new double-queue system is based on finding out in advance the estimated duration of surgery – i.e. long or short procedures which are based on the cardiological examination and the management of queues separately.