ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the systematisation of clinical work helps to relate clinical practice to planning the capital stock. The moves for the systematisation of care change the focus from the individual points of care delivery to the total process of treatment from the stations along the way to the patient's entire journey. A major and rapidly expanding player is Rhon Klinikum, a private healthcare operator specialising in public-private partnerships and with a telling business strategy based on the fundamentally important connections between the systemisation of clinical care, work process control, capitalisation, and quality of clinical outcome. An integrated clinical pathway is not only a tool for clinicians, it is a vehicle for making efficient clinical work the basis for capital investment and business planning. In summary, capital planning for the UK's healthcare infrastructure has historically focused on beds and buildings and largely ignored the links between the processes by which patients are treated and the available models of capital investment.
