Abstract
This article reports the results of two studies on the use of standard care processes and IT for planning and control of mental healthcare processes. The results give insight in the needed functionalities of IT and planning and control of mental healthcare processes. The first study is a case study in a center for multidisciplinary (mental) youth care. This center implemented care programs and an automated planning tool. We studied the success of this implementation and particularly the fit between the care programs and the planning tool. In the second study we studied the characteristics of ambulant mental healthcare processes and the actual and preferable use of planning and control models and IT.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Feedback: Information about the output is fed back to the input.
Adaptive Information Technology: Information Technology that can be adapted to changing circumstances in finding a balance between processes and IT.
Planning: Determination of what should be done.
Control: The process that assures that the planned results are obtained.
Short Term Planning: Planning on short terms with data about monthly, daily, and hourly demand and meaning full statistical distributions to be able to deal with stochasticity and variability.
Enterprise Resource Planning System: Enterprise Resource Planning systems attempt to integrate all corporate information in one central database, and information can be retrieved from many different organizational positions and in principle they allow any organizational object to be made visible (Dechow & Mouritsen, 2005).
Care Program: A care program is a framework where organizations, professionals, and patients should comply with and is used for patient-centered organization of a well described target group. It integrates the activities between different disciplines, professionals, and departments (Berg, Schellekens et al., 2005).
Reactive Decision Making: Decision making based on reacting to unexpected situations due to variability and stochasticity.