Dynamic Capacity Management (DCAMM™) in a Hospital Setting

“Hospitals are dynamic systems and must be analyzed and managed as such. Therefore, we need dynamic analytical tools and thinking to fix hospitals’ most pressing issues” (Story, 2010). This is the premise of the chapter on Dynamic Capacity Management (DCAMM). In the near future, healthcare providers will be expected to achieve even better results with reduced compensation, fewer resources, lower capital expenditures, even stricter regulations and restrictions, and more litigation. This means that there must be a radical operational transformation away from the traditional, static management and improvement methodologies towards a dynamic, high-capacity approach. DCAMM is an analytical methodology and (non-proprietary) toolset that is meant to profoundly change the way hospitals are managed. DCAMM starts with an analysis of dynamic demand, matched against dynamic capacity. This brings forth simple yet important operational concepts that take a dynamic, “systems” level view of the entire care structure (e.g. a hospital or a community). Using specially designed simulation models and the power of predictive analytics, we can achieve a very different perspective on the variability and interdependencies that were once considered chaos. By “managing to” the variation, and understanding and predicting the dynamism of the system, concepts such as “Dynamic Standardization” and “Outlier Management” can augment the existing, static process improvement systems such as Lean and Six Sigma. This chapter will provide an overview of the concepts and structures necessary to profoundly change the way our hospitals, and health systems, are managed. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-872-9.ch002