Understanding the impact of variation in the delivery of healthcare services.

In the past several years, healthcare providers have coped with the financial aspects of managed care and the resultant constraints on revenue. In fact, working with decreasing margins of return has become routine for many providers. Beyond straightforward cost cutting, providers must also consider a variety of other operational factors to achieve success. To this end, higher patient satisfaction and improved utilization and efficiency of resources are natural objectives. Ironically, fundamental to the pursuit of better operations management is the fact that the delivery of healthcare services can vary between and among patients, providers, and organizations for many reasons. Unfortunately, such variation may be overlooked or trivialized if the phenomenon is not well understood by healthcare managers. Knowing how variation affects the delivery of services creates opportunities for focused improvement.