In this video, Director of Optimization Rick Shepardson continues the discussion on queueing theory as it relates to maximizing patient capcity at a healthcare organization. See how increasing capacity with referrals and patient retention affects your ability to provide care and produce positive outcomes. If you'd prefer to read, the transcript is below.
Transcript
Hello again, and welcome back to Nordic's video series on supply and demand as it relates to healthcare. As we discussed last time, we're talking about queueing theory as it applies to the healthcare supply and demand. When we talk about queueing theory, it's really important to understand that there's an inflection point at which the number of patients that you can provide care for relative to the number of patient safety or outcomes or decreased satisfaction comes into play. You want to be able to manage the number of patients that you're seeing effectively so you might set targets for how many patients you can see and what's an acceptable wait time or satisfaction score.
Well, as you start to set these targets, you can get excited. You're like, "Oh, you know what? I want to increase my referrals," or "I want to try to increase patient retention." Those are great things. As a high-performing organization, you can provide care to a lot of patients, and you can increase your patient base and revenue. As you increase the number of patients that you see, you start to use your capacity faster. As you see more and more of different types of patients, you increase your variability. As you increase this variability and you increase the number of patients, well, your line shifts, and now all of a sudden, you are able to see fewer overall patients before you start to see decreases in safety and outcomes.
As an organization, it's really important to be able to monitor these things, be able to understand how satisfied are our patients, what type of outcomes are they receiving, and where are they at in terms of our ability to care for them. As a mindful organization, it's going to be important for you to recognize when this curve has shifted and then how to be able to bring the curve back. We're going to talk about that part next time. Check back in and thanks for watching.