Performance evaluation of local healthcare systems by applying industrial management methods

The healthcare systems in almost all European countries is organized as a territorial networks of service centres, managed by a hierarchical organization driven by either central or regional governments, funded partly by general taxation, partly by workers contributions, and with a limited percentage of individual assurances. In any country, unless relevant adjustments will be applied to healthcare management, incidence of healthcare system cost on GNP is going to be explosive. New methods and procedures for the performance evaluation of the service and for the cost control must be defined and applied, without further delay. This requires to have at disposal clear models of the healthcare system, and robust methods for the system performance analysis. To authors' experience, said models and methods can be derived from industrial management results. Then, this paper will utilize the experience acquired by the CODESNET project in the field of the performance evaluation of SME networks, such as to analyze the transferability of industrial management methods to the service planning and control in the healthcare sector.