Fries JF. Reducing the need and demand for medical care: Implications for quality management and outcome improvement. Quality Management in Health Care. 1997;6(1):34-44.

Reduction in medical need (illness burden) and demand (variability in resource use) can improve health, reduce medical care costs, and move us toward the goal of becoming a healthy society. Health promotion, redefined, works to enhance individual autonomy. The underlying conceptual bases and the abundant empiric documentation of the effectiveness of need and demand reduction are summarized here.

Fries JF. Health care demand management. Medical Interface. 1994;7(3):55-58.

Health care organizations must learn how to manage the demands for their services in order to provide better services while lowering costs.

Chapman SN. Adapting just-in-time inventory control to the hospital setting. Hospital Materials Management. 1986;11(10):8-12.

The principles of Just-in-Time (JIT) inventory management are essentially those of sensible management of productivity and waste. Much of the literature written about JIT, however, is limited in scope in that it focuses on applications in a manufacturing operation. The best way to assess JIT's applicability to all businesses, including hospitals, is to synthesize the characteristics into a basic, conceptual model, which the author does in the following article.

Chapman SN, Carmel JI. Demand/capacity management in health care: An application of yield management. Health Care Management Review. 1992;17:45-54.

Yield management is a system to match demand with constrained capacity used in many non-health care industries. This article describes the application of yield management techniques in health care.

Carlson JG. Just-in-time approach to system-wide efficiency and quality borrows from industrial techniques. Strategies in Healthcare Excellence. 1993;6(2):9-12.

A brief review of the basics in management for optimization of customer service in health care.

Hall RW
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, USA: Prentice Hall; 1991

This book provides basic statistical methodology for queueing theory.

Resar R. Creating attractors for improving access to clinical offices. Physician Executive. 1999;25(6):43-44.

This article explores the barriers and obstacles for gaining buy-in for improving access to care.

Murray M. Modernizing the NHS: Patient care: Access. British Medical Journal. 2000;320:1594-1596.

Delays for access to care plague our healthcare systems. These delays cause patient dissatisfaction, contribute to staff dissatisfaction, and may lead to worsening clinical outcomes. They are also expensive:patients often consume scarce resources while waiting, there is a cost in maintaining any waiting list; the longer the wait the higher the "fail to show" rate, which represents unused capacity; and, finally, there is the risk that patients waiting will arrive with a more costly clinical condition.

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Kilo C, Horrigan D, Godfrey M, Wasson J. Making quality and service pay: Part 2, The external environment. Family Practice Management. 2000;7(10):25.

Across the country, insurers are beginning to pay physicians for improved quality and service. They'll get there faster with your help.

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Hadjistavropoulos HD, Snider B, Bartlett G. Measuring the quality of performance in the management of waiting lists: Using cataract surgery as an example. Joint Commission Journal on Quality Improvement. 1998;24(8):423-425.

Quality of care committees monitor waiting lists to ensure that patient care is not compromised. Frequently, waiting lists are determined by individual physicians, and no explicit criteria determine who is first in the queue.