There's no place like home: Optimizing capacity management of off-site hospital care activities
PhD candidate: Jedidja Lok-Visser
Healthcare organizations are increasingly challenged by a growing patient population and persistent shortages of healthcare professionals. To address this imbalance, many hospitals are relocating hospital-level care outside the traditional hospital building. These off-site care models include remote patient monitoring (RPM) for chronic patients, hospital-at-home programs for clinical patients, and the transfer of day treatments to regional outpatient facilities.
This PhD project focuses on evaluating and optimizing the capacity management of off site hospital level care. The project is embedded within the Strategic Centre of the Isala Hospital, where more than 70 off site care activities have been developed and implemented. All studies are practice driven and conducted in close collaboration with healthcare professionals.
The project consists of the following studies:
- We develop a classification system for off site hospital level care activities from a capacity management perspective.
- We design and evaluate operational strategies for outpatient clinics where one group of patients receives routine follow up care and another group receives short notice appointments triggered by RPM signals. These strategies are also pilot tested in practice.
- We analyze how relocating care affects healthcare costs and regional healthcare professional capacity, and we develop methods for quantifying these effects.
- Lastly, we include the medical perspective by developing a set of quality indicators for home-based parenteral medication administration and quantifying the workload of virtual care nurses.
Together, these studies contribute evidence based insights to support hospitals in organizing and scaling off site hospital level care in a sustainable and efficient way.
External supervisors:
- Dr. Jan Gerard Maring (Isala)