Business process redesign in healthcare: towards a structured approach

This paper focuses on the potential contribution of Business Process Redesign to society's demand for decreasing costs of healthcare. Our focus is on the reduction of throughput times and service times by exploiting business process redesign techniques, i.e. rules of thumb that aim to optimise the business process by improving its tasks, its routing structure, the resource organisation, etc. We define a redesign approach based on a set of existing redesign heuristics and apply this approach in a mental healthcare case. We show seven alternative redesigns for an intake process and evaluate their impact on throughput times and service times. Our conclusion is that the approach is feasible and results in a fruitful input for the organisation in question. This result is in line with results from the evolutionary approach. The application of best practices in the mental healthcare setting shows its potency in this specific context and very similar settings. A next necessary step towards a wider application in healthcare seems to be a more structured method on how to select or combine an effective set of best practices for a specific medical context.