Clinical pathways and operations management. It takes two to tango

In this paper it is shown that quality of care in a hospital setting is not solely determined by the medical treatment of patients. Organizational structure clearly contributes to the qualitative performance measures too. In particular, clinical pathways could be specified in which both components are integrated. Moreover, the operating theater is identified to be an instrument in those clinical pathways that enables the health manager to exploit the relations and dependencies between facilities. This results in an improved patient flow and an adequate use of scarce resources. It will be shown that algorithms and software tools can assist in increasing the performance of the hospital as a whole. These improvements could be gained both through visualization and optimization. Some Belgian case studies will be referred to in order to show the practical value of the academic approaches.