IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sptchp/978-3-032-24835-0_4.html

Capacity Calculations

In: Healthcare Analytics

Author

Listed:
  • Diwakar Gupta

    (The University of Texas at Austin)

Abstract

A fundamental question that healthcare managers face is how to determine the maximum capacity of a healthcare clinic or a hospital service based on a particular provision of resources and patient flow. Different types of patients may require different amounts of time from different resources. This chapter introduces the concepts of a patient flow diagram, bottleneck resource, theoretical maximum capacity, utilization, and throughput rate. Through a thought experiment, it explains the impact of variability on patient waiting times and introduces appointment systems as a mechanism that allows clinics to mediate patients’ direct and indirect waiting times. Finally, it introduces students to the fundamental relationship between average backlog and average waiting time, which is also known as the Little’s law.

Suggested Citation

  • Diwakar Gupta, 2026. "Capacity Calculations," Springer Texts in Business and Economics, in: Healthcare Analytics, chapter 0, pages 21-30, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sptchp:978-3-032-24835-0_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-24835-0_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sptchp:978-3-032-24835-0_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.