Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [618]
Therefore, no matter what the size, shape, location, mission, or orientation of large-scale healthcare organization, they are all facing all or a mix of the same problems:
Growing and aging populations—this translates to more patients and a growing demand from the same population.
Less money—as demands for better value, quality, and quantity increase for the same or lesser amount of healthcare spending.
More technology—to keep pace with advances in the field of medicine and its administration.
Higher expectations—of a continuingly better-educated consumer in most part due to access to medical information via the Internet.
Increasing competition—especially in more developed societies.
A need to provide new medical services to currently underserved populations.
An insufficient supply of clinicians—both physicians and nurses are in short supply globally.
A more mobile population capable of spreading disease faster than ever before.
Healthcare is an industry that will never lose its client base as long as our race survives and it is one of the most regulated, if not the most regulated, industry in the world. It employs the best-educated workforce in the world and in some cases offers the highest and lowest salaries of any profession.
In short, large-scale healthcare organizations can be as difficult to categorize as we are ourselves and their problems can be as diverse as diseases we can suffer from.
Given the huge range of diversity present in healthcare systems, the only accurate model that can be drawn of large-scale healthcare systems is that of a black box into which people enter as patients and from which they leave, with a wide degree of altered states of being from a clean bill of health to dead.
The Goal of Healthcare
The human race has an insatiable appetite for healthcare. This appetite reaches beyond treatment well into the realms of prevention. It is commonly acknowledged that “prevention is better than cure”—when it can be achieved. Inoculation and healthy living practices improve life expectancy, but thus far rarely in enough numbers to release the clinical capacity to treat all of those who need care. No matter what the mode of delivery, socialized or private, there are still sectors of every population that can benefit from additional professional healthcare globally. Therefore, every large-scale healthcare system needs additional capacity to treat more patients.
Medical technology continues to advance, in many cases, quicker than the delivery system can bring the advances to the patients. The advent of the Internet has given the public unprecedented access to news about new treatments and online diagnostic tools and medical Websites are educating patients far more than ever before. The expectations being placed on the medical profession are the highest they have ever experienced and will be unlikely to decelerate in the near future. The healthcare industry is under tremendous pressure to treat patients better to achieve more effective results than in the past.
In the practice of medicine, time is often of the essence. The need for the immediate treatment of trauma is often well provisioned, but even in the most developed of societies ERs get backed up as the not always predictable ebb and flow of patients present themselves for treatment. In contrast to this, the advances made in early detection, more accurate diagnoses, and more effective treatments of less acute but more long-term, chronic conditions has, in some cases, exponentially increased the numbers of people needing lifelong treatment, support, and medication. With the rise in expectations, there is a reduction in the tolerance of the time people are prepared to wait for a medical consultation. There is a pressing need to treat patients