Planning and Control and the Use of Information Technology in Mental Healthcare Organizations

Demand for mental healthcare increases. Simultaneously, the need for more patient oriented processes increases and the market develops towards more competition among providers and organizations. As a result of these developments, mental healthcare organizations are becoming more aware of efficiency and effectiveness. Often, they choose to transform to more process oriented organizations, which require changes in planning and control systems and information technology (IT). However, little is known about the required planning and control systems and IT for mental healthcare. We argue that IT for planning and control of mental healthcare organization needs to be adaptive and support short term planning. IT has to be adaptive to be able to support first and second order control which is needed for planning and control of mental healthcare processes. Short term planning or reactivity is needed to deal with stochasticity and variability as present in mental healthcare. These subjects are further described in the background. This article reports the results of two studies on the use of standard care processes and IT for planning and control of mental healthcare processes. The results give insight in the needed functionalities of IT and planning and control of mental healthcare processes. The first study is a case study in a center for multidisciplinary (mental) youth care. This center implemented care programs and an automated planning tool. We studied the success of this implementation and particularly the fit between the care programs and the planning tool. In the second study we studied the characteristics