Complexities in Demand-Forecasting for a hospital
While forecasting in healthcare, especially demand forecasting, plays an important role in the
management of healthcare services, but developing and applying forecasting techniques in
healthcare is a challenging task. Major challenges arise from the following factors:
Availability of reliable data
Effective and efficient forecasting requires a large amount of historical data based on
which forecasts can be developed. Until recently, capture of data in hospitals have been
heavily reliant on pen and paper, due to which, there is a lack of availability of adequate data
in healthcare services. Even the data that is available is highly unreliable due to various
reporting errors and also high degree of missing data. Despite the recent advances in
healthcare, adoption of electronic health records (EHR) system has been very slow. Even in
hospitals with such EHR systems, there is reluctance among physicians and nurses to use
such systems due to various reasons such as convenience and time needed to enter data.
External factors
Healthcare demand depends to a large extent on various external factors such as
