Assignment: Healthcare Network Regional Capacity Master Planning

Problem Statement/Background

For over 50 years, the Rockwell Healthcare Network (RHN) has provided many types of medical services across the New England area of the United States. The location of RHN facilities historically evolved without much master planning in terms of which services it provides where and in what capacities. This is an important issue in many integrated healthcare networks. RHN's new management team recently identified this as a key strategic goal in order to remain both economically competitive and provide better patient-centered care.

The CEO, Walt Vincent, has enlisted the NSF Healthcare Systems Engineering Center in Boston MA to help develop a long-term master plan for locating medical care services. In today's marketplace, RHN's Board of Directors is continually challenged with balancing costs, appointment access, and patient satisfaction. As industrial engineering consultants in the center, your task is to develop an appropriate computer simulation model and help the Board answer three key questions:

1. In the ideal world, where should each medical service be located and in what capacities so that patients can obtain the types of care they need within an acceptable travel distance, and with minimal waits, an acceptable percentage of the time?

2. Given current facility locations and sizes, what capacities for each service at each facility would minimize total costs?

3. What would be an effective approach to balance these key but competing criteria (costs, patient satisfaction, waits and delays)?

Some Details

Table 1 summarizes the total sizes of existing RHN facilities and current capacities for each medical specialty. If a RHN patient visits a non-Rockwell facility, the costs to RHN of treatment and billing can exceed 15%-to-22% of the costs if the same procedure was handled within a Rockwell facility. If travel distance to a medical facility is too large or the delay to get an appointment is too great, some patients may elect to get their care outside the network. Table 2 summarizes the mean and variability in appointments for each type of medical specialty, which can vary both locally and regionally due to practice heterogeneity. Month-to-month demand for appointments (averages, standard deviations) within each region of the RHN network and for each type of medical specialty care is summarized in Table 3 (Demand for each type of care depends on population size and patient demographics). Table 4 summarizes the travel distances between patient locations and RHN facilities (locations are aggregated at the zip code level; e.g., L1, L2, L3 etc). If a facility cannot see patients in a timely manner, they may wait longer than personally acceptable or decide to just get their care elsewhere. Beyond the information provided below RHN doesn't have all potentially desired data so, depending on the approach your consulting team takes, you may have to make reasonable assumptions or do some research, such as on the likelihood of balking based on distance and so on.

Problem Extensions

After several meetings and review of your team's data analysis, it has been discovered that several medical services can experience correlated demand, such as due to co-morbidities and treatment causality. Thus patients needing to receive Care Type A often also need Care Type B (the same patients sometimes requiring cardiology and pulmonary services), and so on (see Table 5). The Board also has become concerned about the fact that demographics are projected to change significantly over the next two decades, with things like changing ages and smaller marketplaces resulting in 1-3% fewer patients per year, depending on the specialty. RCN has extended your contract to provide answers to the following questions.

1. Determine how and to what extent correlated healthcare needs changes the results your previous analyses.
2. Propose a long-term capacity plan (e.g. over a 20 year planning horizon) and contrast it to your initial results.

Attachment:- Assignment-Healthcare-Network.rar