ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to patient flow logistics. Particularly, the first paragraph presents a general theoretical framework to assess hospital patient flows’ performance while the following focus on specific production units: operating room; emergency department and wards. Partial approaches that focus only on single hospital resources or on discrete interventions, rather than the full production cycle, tend to lead the overall system to suboptimal results. Consequently, meaningful and effective patient flow strategies need to adopt a system-wide approach. The clinical pathways consist of the series of physician and nursing activities performed with sub-groups of patients who are homogeneous under a clinical perspective, but not under a logistics perspective. In fact, clinical pathways related to complex conditions may cross different hospital production pipelines. The model presented in this paragraph represents a useful framework to build a system-wide dashboard to monitor hospital patient flow logistics’ performance.
