Quantitative Methods in Health Care Management
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION TO QUANTITATIVE
DECISION-MAKING METHODS
IN HEALTH CARE MANAGEMENT
In today's highly complicated, technological, and competitive health care arena,
the public's outcry is for administrators, physicians, and other health care professionals
to provide high quality care at a lower cost. Health care managers must
therefore find ways to get excellent results from more limited resources. The goal
of this book is to introduce aspiring health care managers to operations research
models that allow decision makers to sort out complex issues and to make the best
possible use of available resources. Such models are used, for example, to forecast
patient demand, and to guide capital acquisition and capacity decisions,
facility planning, personnel and patient scheduling, supply chain, and quality
control. They use mathematical and statistical techniques: multivariate statistical
analysis, decision analysis, linear programming, project evaluation and review
technique (PERT), queuing analysis, and simulation, to name a few.
This book presents all these techniques from the perspective of health care
organizations' delivery of care, rather than their traditional manufacturing
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