The future of healthcare delivery will increasingly resemble the aviation industry as it adopts predictive analytics and system-wide collaboration to run more smoothly, according to an article in MedCity News. Mohan Giridharadas, a specialist in lean methodologies, says hospitals must learn to optimize their existing resources in order to care for more patients with fewer resources. They can look to airports as a model of how to operate more effectively.
In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy International Airport handled only a few hundred flights per day. Today, the facility manages thousands. “The aviation industry has diligently invested in the required technology, systems, and processes to monitor, measure, collaborate, and orchestrate,” Giridharadas writes. “Similarly, hospitals are also beginning to invest in the technology, systems, and processes to maximize patient access at each ‘node’ and to streamline the linkages across nodes.”
With improved technology and management, hospitals will do a better job leveraging their “assets” like the OR, inpatient beds, clinics, infusion chairs, and MRI machines throughout the day, Giridharadas says. More patients will be treated in the same locations without increasing facility size, and lag time across the continuum of care will be reduced.
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