  This article showcases a personal decision support tool (PDST) called
HOPLITE, for performing insightful and actionable quantitative assessments of
hospital capacity, to support hospital planners and health care managers. The
tool is user-friendly and intuitive, automates tasks, provides instant
reporting, and is extensible. It has been developed as an Excel Visual Basic
for Applications (VBA) due to its perceived ease of deployment, ease of use,
Office's vast installed userbase, and extensive legacy in business. The
methodology developed in this article bridges the gap between mathematical
theory and practice, which our inference suggests, has restricted the uptake
and or development of advanced hospital planning tools and software. To the
best of our knowledge, no personal decision support tool (PDST) has yet been
created and installed within any existing hospital IT systems, to perform the
aforementioned tasks. This article demonstrates that the development of a PDST
for hospitals is viable and that optimization methods can be embedded quite
simply at no cost. The results of extensive development and testing indicate
that HOPLITE can automate many nuanced tasks. Furthermore, there are few
limitations and only minor scalability issues with the application of free to
use optimization software. The functionality that HOPLITE provides may make it
easier to calibrate hospitals strategically and/or tactically to demands. It
may give hospitals more control over their case-mix and their resources,
helping them to operate more proactively and more efficiently.
