At a hair salon, not everyone is equally proficient at braiding or dyeing. A service type at which differences in skills and competencies of those who serve clients is even more delicate is healthcare: not all medical doctors are experts in all things human, but instead have a set of specializations on which they are providing consultation. This setup poses us with a matching problem: when presented with various patients and doctors, if we have prior knowledge of patient needs and doctor skills, which doctor should see which patient, assuming that the capacity of each doctor is limited that day / week / month / whichever horizon of planning we operate on?
This module will help you do the following:
For context, let's first view a video from a news article.
In an ideal world, every patient could see a doctor the moment they walk into a clinic. Make a brief list of limiting factors that you can think of that make this unrealistic. Briefly discuss what are the scarce resources that need to be controlled and what kinds of processes need to be set in place to carry out such control over which patient gets to see which doctor when not everyone can be attended to on the spot.
After this module, you should be familiar with the following concepts:
Remember that you can always look concepts up in the glossary. Should anything be missing or insufficient, please report it.