S Ketabi - Department of Management, University of Isfahan and Center for Studies on Health Management and Economics
S Ajami

The area of health care has attracted a great deal of recent attention in many countries. Health care management is a very complicated and demanding business. Limitations in health care funding require physicians and hospitals to find effective ways to utilize resources. Although the health care industry faces many of the same issues confronting other industries, but it is a business like no other. It has multiple decision-makers with conflicting goals and objectives [3]. On the other hand, health care industry is different from others in objectives, costs, customers, behavior and nature. In the health care management, the main objectives are to increase quality and access to health care services and, at the same time, to control spiraling medical costs. Operations Research methods can be used to improve performance and the efficiency of existing resources; to minimize costs or maximize quality, or a combination of both. One of the major issues in health care is waiting times for patients to access services such as hospital care. Hospitals are the most important unit in health care industry, as they serve people directly without any intermediate contact. The patients' satisfaction is one of the most important factors to evaluate health care services. Delay in accessing the services is not only undesirable for patients from financial and psychological points of view, but also is not favored for managers, because of the high cost of health services. Hospitals are indeed faced with limited resources including beds to hold admitted patients. In this research, hospital processes are studied so that a decision based model is derived for the procedures. Since health care services have stochastic nature, the processes can be thought of as a network of queues. Then, it will be possible to investigate on the possible ways to decrease waiting times of patients. It is important to investigate on the delay in discharge processes since it will affect the length of stay of patients at the hospital, i.e. it dealt with the hospital resource allocation issues and how to make it efficient