Establishing generic problem structures and repeatable solution approaches for healthcare delivery problems

设计长期可行（即可持续）的系统是许多行业面临的问题。库存系统接收的产品比运送的多，会耗尽存储空间。接听电话的速度快于结束电话的速度，呼叫中心的等待时间变得无限长。如果医疗保健机构接受的新患者数量超过了其积极治疗的能力，就会出现拥堵和/或加班。使这些系统复杂化的是不确定性，因此设置容量等于需求是不够的，并导致需要将闲置容量作为缓冲。这个缓冲对可持续性和性能至关重要，但通常设置较低，以尽量减少“未使用”的容量。其中，确定缓冲区的大小和设计更聪明的方法（例如池化）来减少使用是设计可持续系统的重大挑战。

Designing systems that are viable over the long term (i.e. sustainable) is a problem faced in many industries. Inventory systems which receive more products than they ship run out of space. Call centres receiving calls faster than they end calls see waiting times grow unbounded. Healthcare practices that accept more new patients than they can actively treat will experience congestion and/or overtime. Complicating these systems is uncertainty, thus setting capacity equal to demand is insufficient and results in the need to incorporate idle capacity as a buffer. This buffer is crucial for sustainability and performance but is often set low in order to minimize "unused" capacity. Among others, determining the size of this buffer and designing clever ways (e.g. pooling) to get by with less are substantial challenges to designing sustainable systems.