mProving capacity management for healthcare transformation
PhD candidate: Thao Nguyen
To maintain accessible and sustainable healthcare, hospitals are transforming how care is organized and delivered. This PhD research investigates how hospital capacity and work processes can be better organized to support healthcare professionals and ensure that patients receive the right care at the right place and time.
The research is conducted within the mProve network, a collaboration of seven top-clinical hospitals in the Netherlands working together on data-driven healthcare transformation. This setting enables the study of real operational challenges across multiple hospitals and supports the development of solutions closely connected to clinical practice.
Currently, the PhD project consists of three research projects. The first examines the growing shift from in-hospital care to care delivered outside hospital walls, such as home monitoring. It develops a classification framework to structure different forms of off-site hospital activities and their capacity characteristics, supported by an international survey among healthcare professionals.
The second focuses on Virtual Care Centers (VCCs), where nurses remotely monitor patients and respond to alerts. As this introduces new nursing activities and uncertainty in daily operations, the project develops scheduling models that integrate both planned tasks and uncertain events.
The third investigates how surgical planning and day-care treatment capacity can be better aligned to improve patient flow. Motivated by the increasing shift of surgical patients from clinical wards to day-care units, this project studies how surgical sequencing and downstream capacity interact, with models evaluated through a case study and pilot implementation in one of the mProve hospitals.
