The last World Health Organization report in 2000, where world health care systems were compared, ranked the United States as 37th in health care delivery even though it spends a higher proportion of its domestic product on health care than any other country in the world. Providing health care throughout the world is a combination of private and public efforts to ensure access in a fair, efficient, cost-effective and high-quality manner.

The effective use of resources in the delivery of health care is critical in order to allocate resources to activities which contribute to its improvement. Like in many other industries, how to deploy and consume resources across all aspects of health care delivery is the key problem statement whereby the cost of misallocation can literally cost lives. For health care providers and their public entity counterparts, a close examination of their business processes and their consumption of valuable resources is a necessary step to improvement.