Healthcare System Design

This book includes several design applications in several fields: energy, large systems, manufacturing, and many more. In this chapter, we turn our focus to the design of healthcare systems. But first, we ask what exactly do we mean by healthcare systems? This chapter will describe the large scale and scope of what is meant by the phrase “healthcare systems.” A broad definition of Healthcare System Design consequently leads to the recognition of the large number of stakeholders affected by such designs. The need for appropriate, effective, timely, sustainable, and cost-effective healthcare services has been recognized globally, and has led to an increasingly growing healthcare sector. As the healthcare sector continues to expand, there are several unique challenges that have risen due to the many siloed designers acting on different parts of the healthcare system. The goal of this chapter is to orient the reader to the various scale and scope of healthcare systems and to present a structure that allows the reader to thoughtfully consider the design process relative to stakeholders, system boundary, system functions for functional requirement (FR) selection, system form for design parameter selection (DP), and consequently the process variables (PV).