Forecasting Demand and Understanding Variations in Healthcare: A Strategic Perspective

Abstract

As health systems worldwide confront increasing demand variability, resource constraints, and unpredictable disruptions, such as pandemics, healthcare forecasting becomes crucial for aligning capacity with need. This paper examines the crucial role of forecasting in healthcare, its conceptual foundations, practical applications, challenges, and strategic implications. It examines forecasting techniques, explores supply–demand mismatches, and reviews the role of variation and variability in healthcare systems. Using theoretical insights, it identifies the operational challenges and approaches, including the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and their potential to improve the effectiveness of healthcare forecasting. The importance of the application of forecasting in tackling the expected and unexpected health systems complexities and disruptions globally is highlighted. This paper contributes to the growing discourse on forecasting and data-driven healthcare transformation and invites continued exploration into healthcare forecasting as a lever for quality improvement and resilience. It stimulates new thinking and insights into the application of healthcare forecasting as both a science and a strategic lever for improvement.

Received: 29 July 2025 | Revised: 29 October 2025 | Accepted: 2 December 2025

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Author Contribution Statement

Ikedinachi Ogamba: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration.