UF professor researches planning strategies for health-care delivery

A University of Florida researcher has received a $250,000 National Science Foundation grant to develop planning tools that will help administrators at health-care organizations deliver quality, affordable care.

Led by Murray Côté, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of health services administration at UF’s College of Public Health and Health Professions, a research team is developing a set of planning tools over the next three years that draws upon health-care capacity planning techniques. The team includes Elif Akçalı, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of industrial and systems engineering at UF’s College of Engineering and Kurt Bretthauer, Ph.D., an associate professor from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Health-care capacity planning is the science of predicting the quantity and attributes of resources, such as physicians, nurses, technicians, equipment and facilities, required to deliver health care at specified levels of quality and cost. Successful capacity planning matches appropriate resources with demand, respects patient preferences and needs, ensures resources are available when needed and avoids wasting resources.

Nationwide, health-care organizations are facing such challenges as bed shortages, increased cost of resources, declining government and private reimbursements, and higher demand for critical care, surgical and emergency services.

“In most economic models, the goal is to spend less money, but health-care organizations also have a set of performance objectives to meet, including providing high quality care and ensuring appropriate utilization of resources,” Côté said. “Planning models that capture these two objectives are necessary to improve the delivery of care.”

Côté said the goal of this research project is to produce health-care capacity planning tools that are integrative, generalizable and useful for a variety of health-care organizations, including outpatient practices, community hospitals and major medical centers. Previous research in this area has tended to be either facility or industry specific.

The researchers are working with three health-care organizations representing primary, secondary and tertiary levels of care: the University of Florida Student Health Care Center, the emergency department at York Hospital in York, Pa., and Holmes Regional Medical Center in Melbourne, Fla. These organizations will help the research team understand the issues and challenges associated with health-care capacity planning in their facility and will provide the researchers with comprehensive patient, cost and resource data related to their delivery of care.

Côté hopes the planning models that result from the research will improve understanding of the complexities of the health-care industry, advance health-care capacity planning, and strengthen relationships between the industry and academic programs.

“The broader impact of the proposed research will be to improve the effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness and efficiency of health-care services, thereby improving the quality of patient care and health service delivery in the United States,” he said.

Côté expects that eventually the planning tools will be accessible on desktop computers and, with training, will be available to health-care administrators across the country.