Application of Capacity Planning on Dental Health Service System

Quality of healthcare services recently has received increasing attention. Health care institutions with high quality staff and well design of the service system could enhance their service quality. Service system design comprises demand analysis, service capacity planning, appointment system design etc. However, dental service differs so much from other medical service. The design of the service system in dental care should be investigated separately. In Taiwan, there are so many dental clinics that the market competition is intensively. Therefore, the service system design in dental care is more important. We therefore propose a 3-year research project to deal with the service system design to enhance the dental service quality under the intensive competition scenario. We have identifies three research issues: (1) model the skill-mix of dental service: forecasting the demand of dental service based on the record of the dental treatment and design the service capacity to fulfill patients’ demand; (2) propose an objective evaluation model to the dental resident selection practices, and the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method would be used; (3) design the system of outpatient appointment: establishing dynamic and stochastic simulation model to assess the performance of the outpatient appointment system. These three research issues are new from the academic perspective and their solutions will be valuable from the perspective of enhancing the dental service quality.

Project ID:PB10308-2708
External Project ID:MOST103-2221-E182-043