In the current era of demand for more efficient resource use and cost reduction, many healthcare organizations struggle with typical issues such as Capacity, Staffing, Scheduling, Patient Flow, etc. This list can easily be extended to include many other operational issues. Why is it so challenging for many organizations to develop and implement efficient and sustainable long-term solutions? First, most managerial decisions are being made in a highly variable environment. It is a general human tendency to avoid the complications of incorporating uncertainty into decision-making by ignoring it or turning it into certainty. For example, average procedure or wait times are typically treated as fixed values ignoring the influence of the skewed variability around them. Another factor is that complex systems, like most healthcare organizations, usually contain multiple internal interdependencies of units and staff. Traditional management lacks a means of capturing such interdependencies that are critical for making sustainable and justified managerial decisions. This is a root cause of the frequently observed unintended consequences of managerial decisions that look reasonable on the surface. The truly justified and efficient managerial decisions can be achieved only using data analytics and simulation modeling methodology. Management science is a systematic way of developing managerial decisions for allocating material, human, and financial resources that best meet an organization's operational performance objectives. Decisions for leveraging resources should be based on a comparative analysis (various scenarios of using limited resources) of validated computer simulation models. At the same time, the decision-makers do not need to know all the technical details of data analytics and simulation modeling. Application of this methodology is a separate profession that requires special expertise. However, decision-makers do need to know and practice fundamental scientific management principles. Understanding the fundamental management principles is highly valuable as a starting point for efficient operations management. Some general management principles related to capacity, patient flow, staffing, etc. along with detailed explanations and examples are presented, e.g. in the recent Springer book “Healthcare Management Engineering in Action”

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-53663-2 The Bottom line. The fundamental management principles are as objective as the laws of physics. However, the laws of physics cannot be violated while the laws of management can and are frequently violated. Organizations pay a heavy price for doing so and are usually not aware of this waste. Knowledge of the fundamental management principles helps the decision-makers steer in the right direction without plunging into technical details of data analytics and simulation modeling that form the basis and justification for these principles.