Optimizing Your Capacity to Care : A Systems Approach to Hospital and Population Health Management

Our nation's capacity to care is becoming increasingly stressed as an aging and increasingly unhealthy population collides with a relative reduction in the numbers of clinicians and ever-tightening financial resources. If even the mildest of future-state predictions are to be believed, we need a significant restructuring of our entire healthcare system and its total Capacity to Care, such that we can simultaneously improve care capacity, cost, quality, accessibility, and resource gratification.

Optimizing Your Capacity to Care: A Systems Approach to Hospital and Population Health Management provides comprehensive guidance to a new way to optimize and manage community-wide Care Capacity via a unique, holistic approach to healthcare operations. Through clear examples and actual project results, the book demonstrates the outcomes of a systems-level way of thinking about a community's Capacity to Care that incorporates and integrates the full spectrum of available clinical and communal resources into the care of patients, including hospitals, physicians, emergency departments, surgical services, local churches, civic organizations, pharmacies, and volunteers.

The book details operational models for each major department of the hospital and a fully integrated communal resource pool to demonstrate how the optimization of capacity, resource utilization, cost, and clinical outcomes can be attained. And by providing healthcare leaders with a deeper understanding of key elements missing from the most common process improvement methodologies and approaches, this book offers fresh perspectives and bold alternatives for hospitals, health systems, and entire communities.

Pierce Story is the co-founder of Capacity Strategies, Inc., a firm dedicated to the optimization of the "Capacity to Care" in hospitals and communities. His unique expertise lies in "Dynamic Care Capacity Management" (a concept he has developed over the past 15 years); process and systems optimization; resource utilization; and the application of systems dynamics and process simulation to healthcare environments.

During his 25-plus-year healthcare career, Story has developed several innovative care and business models to improve health system operations and promote population health outcomes. His passion lies in creating holistic, systemic responses to key constraints facing healthcare, especially in low-income and at-risk communities. He has worked extensively in departmental and hospital-wide performance and capacity optimization as well as new facility planning throughout the care continuum, including work in Emergency Departments, Surgical Services, inpatient units, and community-based health clinics.