General Approach and Prerequisites for Transferring Factory Planning Methods on Flow Orientation and Transformability to Hospital Systems

Abstract

Manufacturing companies are faced with the challenge of operating cost-efficiently and remaining competitive in a turbulent environment with constantly changing demands on production. To meet these challenges, factory planning has developed concepts of flow orientation and transformability. Through decades of research, factory planners now have extensive methodologies and numerous principles, enabling them to design factory objects appropriately and align factories to be flow-oriented and transformable. Hospitals face similar challenges like manufacturing companies. Due to public funding, many hospitals have limited financial resources and must, for example, cover parts of their financial requirements by themselves through cost-efficiency. In addition, hospitals are influenced by ongoing developments like demographic change and recent challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These and further examples not only tighten the economic situation of hospitals, but also force their systems to adapt to resulting challenges. They must successfully align their systems to remain operational under changing conditions. In contrast to factories, these issues have not been addressed sufficiently in the field of hospital planning. Therefore, factory planning approaches on flow orientation and transformability will be transferred to hospital systems in order to strengthen hospitals against globally existing and socially relevant challenges in the healthcare system. With the aim to realise this venture, this paper presents a structured approach for its implementation. It also investigates the fundamental similarities between factories and hospitals and examines whether the main prerequisites for the successful transfer of the approaches can be met.