Dramatically reduced waiting-time for CT-scans

The University of Twente (UT) in collaboration with the AMC-hospital in Amsterdam, found a new way to reduce the waiting time for a CT-scan from 21 days to no more than 5. This radical process-innovation lead not only to an improvement of the service delivered to patients, it also helped to reduce the costs of the process. A simulation study was used in the research at hand. The UT published a press-release (also one in Dutch) on their homepage. It makes me curious how this innovation process looked like. Who initiated it? What was the urgency? Who learned from it? The solution is said to be applicable to other hospitals as well. Would it take a learning process for them as well to work in this way? Would it again be an innovation? I am curiously waiting for the article to be published in Health Care Management Review.

Reference: Health Care Management Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 2007: ‘Applying the Variety Reduction Principle to management of ancillary services’, S.G. Elkhuizen (AMC) , J.R.C. van Sambeek, E.W. Hans, J.J. Krabbendam, P.J.M. Bakker.