Beyond doctor shortages: Rethinking Canada’s healthcare bottleneck

Canada faces an acute shortage of doctors and medical equipment. But simply hiring more people or buying more machines won’t fix our healthcare backlog. In this episode of The Executive Summary, professor Opher Baron explains how — from an operations management perspective — we got into this mess, and why smarter planning and better use of data are just as essential as addressing our shortages if we really want to dig out of Canada’s healthcare deficit.

Show notes:

[0:00] Canadians are in a healthcare crisis.

[0:12] Meet Opher Baron, a professor of operations management at the Rotman School, and an expert in hospital queues. He doesn’t believe more doctors and medical equipment will get us out of our healthcare crisis.

[1:34] A recognition that our healthcare system – and its problems – is nuanced and complex, and this episode is just 15 minutes.

[2:07] Canada has a supply shortage: too few doctors and too little equipment to meet the population demand.

[2:42] This shortage is felt across all sectors of healthcare, but acutely in family care and emergency care.

[3:12] The provincial governments are taking steps to remediate the problems, but it won’t happen quickly.

[4:20] So how did we get here? In short: Poor planning.

[5:31] Hospitals are chaotic, and that makes it difficult to plan.

[7:21] Let’s look at how one issue – continuity of care, coupled with physician incentives – can affect how quickly patients move through an emergency room. Simply, doctors are more likely to take patients at the beginning of their shift than at the end of it.

[9:57] How do you address these types of issues? First, you need to be measuring the right key performance indicators…which we’re not. And you can’t fix a problem, if you can’t identify the problem.

[11:49] Let’s start by recognizing that healthcare professionals aren’t operations management experts.

[12:33] Opher has worked with several hospitals to test new operational efficiencies, including Erie Shores.

[13:58] With the advent of AI, there’s also a lot of opportunity in what Opher calls “digital twin” environments, which will allow hospital administrators to test changes virtually before implementing them in real life.

[15:13] We can’t just throw money at the problem and expect we’ll fix our healthcare system. “I hope that once people understand better what is the important data for them and what they can do with the right data…we can improve the efficiency of our systems, and given the current resources, investing a little bit more kind of in the right places.”

Be sure to check out the Executive Summary back catalogue. We tackle everything from whether we can fix our broken online review system to how extreme heat negatively impacts companies' bottom lines.