Operations management in hospitals: A literature review

Researcher and academics have been using operation management methods and tools, as continuous improvement projects, to address problems related to process efficiency and financial pressure in hospitals. Although there are literature reviews related to continuous improvement projects in hospitals, to authors' knowledge, there is a lack of information about the contributions that other operation management methods and tools have been applied and/or investigated in hospitals, such as supply chain management, logistics, human resources, and performance measurement. Therefore, the purposes of this research are (i) define if hospitals' problems and solutions is a topic of interest in an overall operations management field and (ii) to characterize the literature available. In order to achieve this aim, a literature review limited to the International Journal of Operation and Production Management was conducted. This research shows that hospital problems and solutions have been increasing over time in an operations management field overall, author collaboration has been increasing in recent years, and the topics most commonly addressed are related to performance, quality and process improvement. The limitation of this research is the use of a single journal; therefore, future work should be conducted a systematic literature review to validate some of these findings.