A systems approach to health planning.

  • 1 January 1969
    • journal article
    • Vol. 4  (2) , 96-111
Abstract
This paper describes a holistic approach to the planning of personal health services, considering health services not as an aggregate of independent parts but as interdependent groups forming a unified whole. It defines a stochastic model, utilizing a Markov chain that integrates the component parts involved in health service systems for planning purposes. The three applications described are prediction, for the ordinary statistical problem of forecasting; parametric study or simulation, for determining the effect on the whole system of simulated changes in its parameters; and goal seeking, for calculating the optimal utilization strategy to achieve a specified goal under given constraints such as minimization of costs or resources. Numerical examples are given for each application.

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