Patient Flow in Healthcare: A Business Analyst’s Guide
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
What you’ll learn
- Understand how patient flow, information flow, and workflows operate across healthcare systems.
- Analyze real-world healthcare processes to identify bottlenecks, delays, and inefficiencies.
- Apply business analysis techniques to improve patient experience, safety, and operational performance.
- Map current-state workflows and design practical, data-driven improvements.
- Evaluate real case studies including emergency care, inpatient operations, medication safety, mental health, and digital transformation.
- Understand how emerging technologies, including AI, support clinical decision-making and healthcare optimization.
Course Content
- Course Introduction –> 3 lectures • 6min.
- Module 1 – Patient Journey Fundamentals –> 8 lectures • 12min.
- Module 2 – Mapping Patient Flow –> 8 lectures • 11min.
- Module 3 – Bottlenecks and BA Interventions –> 8 lectures • 13min.
- Module 4 – Redesign, Legacy Systems & Optimization –> 12 lectures • 32min.
- Module 5: Case Studies & Capstone Project –> 9 lectures • 42min.
- Course Wrap-Up –> 3 lectures • 6min.
Requirements
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Course description
Patient flow is one of the most important aspects of healthcare operations. It influences access to care, coordination between teams, patient experience, staff workload, and overall system performance.
In this course, you will learn how to analyze the patient journey from first contact through registration, care delivery, discharge, and follow-up. You will see how Business Analysts identify delays, handoff issues, hidden dependencies, and process breakdowns that impact care delivery.
This course is the second step in a structured Healthcare Business Analysis learning path. It builds on the foundational concepts from the first course and moves into a deeper, more practical understanding of how work actually flows through healthcare systems.
What You’ll Learn
- Map the patient journey across key stages of care
- Identify bottlenecks, delays, and handoff failures
- Connect patient flow challenges to structured business analysis findings
- Understand how systems, data, and policies influence workflow performance
- Recommend practical improvements that support better operations and patient experience
Real-World Use Cases Included
This course includes six structured real-world healthcare scenarios that demonstrate how patient flow works in practice and where it breaks down.
You will work through examples such as:
- New patient access and scheduling delays
- Registration and intake bottlenecks
- Emergency department congestion and patient flow pressure
- Coordination gaps between departments
- Discharge delays and transition challenges
- Follow-up and continuity of care issues
Each use case shows how problems appear in real environments and how a Business Analyst can identify, analyze, and improve them.
Who This Course Is For
- Aspiring or current Business Analysts in healthcare
- Healthcare operations professionals seeking a process-oriented perspective
- Analysts who want to understand care delivery end-to-end
- Learners building a structured Healthcare BA skill set across multiple courses
Requirements
- No prior healthcare business analysis experience required
- Willingness to observe processes carefully and think critically
- Interest in healthcare operations, patient experience, or process improvement
Why This Course Matters
- Patient flow is where theory becomes visible in practice.
- When the journey is well designed, care becomes easier to deliver and easier to receive. When it breaks down, the impact appears in delays, confusion, rework, and frustration.
- Understanding patient flow gives Business Analysts a practical way to identify problems, support better decisions, and contribute to meaningful improvements.
Course Format
This course uses short, focused lessons with clear narration and structured slides. The goal is to make complex concepts easy to follow while staying grounded in real-world healthcare scenarios.
What Makes This Course Different
This course does not treat patient flow as an abstract concept.
It shows how the journey actually works, where it breaks down, and how a Business Analyst can identify issues and improve the system. The focus is practical, structured, and directly aligned with real healthcare environments.
Capstone Project
This course includes a practical capstone project.
You will analyze a real-world patient flow scenario, identify key issues and bottlenecks, map workflows and dependencies, and recommend structured improvements. You will present your findings using a professional Business Analyst format.
This hands-on experience bridges the gap between learning and real application.
Instructor Bio
I hold a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University with a concentration in Digital Information and Communications.
My career began in the telecommunications industry at Bell Labs, where I worked as a Senior Member of Technical Staff in IP services. I contributed to large-scale system integration efforts during the Bell Atlantic, GTE, and NYNEX merger that formed Verizon, and led development efforts for network monitoring systems.
Over time, I have worked across complex systems in telecom, healthcare, and enterprise environments, including Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Merck, and Elsevier. This experience has given me a practical understanding of how large systems operate, where they break down, and what it takes to improve them.
My approach is simple: understand the system, analyze it carefully, and improve it with purpose. That same mindset shapes how I teach, with a focus on clarity, structure, and real-world application.
If you want to understand patient flow in a practical, business-focused way, this course will help you see the system more clearly and improve how you analyze it.
It is a strong next step in the Healthcare Business Analysis series.