Despite world-class, extraordinary advances in technology and medicine, the vast majority of hospitals manage key operational functions such as patient and case scheduling with little more than glorified calendars. If an operating room is a hospital’s most expensive real estate, why is it being booked with a pencil and paper over a fax machine? It’s an inefficiency that creates a lose/lose/lose scenario for providers, patients, and the bottom line.

Other asset-intensive industries with similar challenges and high variability in demand (transportation, airlines, retail) have solved this problem with scalable predictive analytics and prescriptive tools. What’s stopping healthcare from doing the same?

The answer is as old as time – math. In the book Better Healthcare Through Math, Mohan Giridharadas and Sanjeev Agrawal share how predictive analytics, lean principles, deep data science, and machine learning can unlock capacity and solve some of healthcare’s hardest challenges. With sophisticated data, analytics leaders are able to do more with less and maximize healthcare capacity. That’s a winning equation.