A systems approach to health planning.

This paper describes a holistic approach to the planning of personal health services, considering health services not as an aggregate of independent parts but as interdependent groups forming a unified whole. It defines a stochastic model, utilizing a Markov chain that integrates the component parts involved in health service systems for planning purposes. The three applications described are prediction, for the ordinary statistical problem of forecasting; parametric study or simulation, for determining the effect on the whole system of simulated changes in its parameters; and goal seeking, for calculating the optimal utilization strategy to achieve a specified goal under given constraints such as minimization of costs or resources. Numerical examples are given for each application.