Heuristics and Optimizing Techniques Applied to Long Range Facility Planning for Hospital Ancillary Departments

A conceptual framework for long range facility planning of ancillary departments in hospitals is proposed and successfully applied to a radiology department. The framework involves the interactions of optimizing techniques with heuristics for effective and efficient achievement of an organizational objective. It uses outputs from ad optimizing technique as inputs to a heuristic, and vice versa. This approach does not guarantee an absolute optimal plan, but it does provide the best plan relative to the alternatives developed by following a systematic search within the framework.

The proposed framework is adaptable to the organizational needs of health centers, hospitals and other service organizations. It should enhance the understanding of complex planning processes by managers through providing means to separate vital from trivial policy inputs.