Need for flexibility and innovation in healthcare management systems

There are tremendous benefits to view a healthcare system as a flexible system. It helps to promote innovations towards greater quality of service as well as better utilization of the resources. Healthcare System (HCS) in India needs to promote improved customer services, greater collaborations within Health System, improved HCS system designs, re-engineering of the conventional processes, greater emphasis on total quality management, improved flexibility to respond quickly to various system needs and a good IT support. Development of the demonstrative simulation models for alternative HCS can offer alternative solutions to achieve more effective healthcare management systems. The objective of this paper is to study the existing healthcare system design and then propose suggestions towards a more customer friendly (yet efficient and competitive) healthcare system. This paper also presents some insight of the simulation model of the healthcare system (HCS) viewed as a flexible system. A flexible system view offers enormous knowledge that may be utilized to deploy and exploit flexibility (to be more quality oriented towards patient needs and yet remain efficient and competitive) with suitable IT based control strategies. It is like learning the best practices from one domain (Technology Systems) and employing them to another domain (Health Systems) with suitable adaptations. Our paper aims to offer some novel suggestions for HCS and show the benefits of treating it as a flexible system.