Can management science methods do more to improve healthcare?

Abstract

In recent years healthcare has recognised the potential of management science methods (mainly from industry) to address challenging issues which are still unresolved, and continually posing huge problems and incurring massive costs. This paper is an attempt to investigate the gap between the application of management science in healthcare and in other industries. Adopting a novel review methodology, we carried out an extensive scientific survey of the published (academic), grey and patent literature in different areas of management and planning in an attempt to identify where there has already been a substantial contribution from management science methods to healthcare problems and where there is a clear potential for more work to be done. The focus is on the read-across to the healthcare domain from such approaches applied generally to management and planning, how the methods are currently being used to improve patient care and how academics and practitioners can contribute to improve these methods and developing new approaches so as to incorporate the complexities of healthcare, and fully exploit the potential for improvement.