Each of the several thousand hospitals in the United States is faced with the task of meeting the demands for its facilities, services, and personnel by individuals seeking satisfaction for their health care needs as well as by physicians seeking satisfaction for their professional needs. In general, these demands are not in perfect balance with the available supply at any point in time. It is the purpose of this paper to identify the specific problems created by excess demand for specific services at a specific institution—Henry Ford Hospital—and to present a scheme to minimize both the magnitude and the adverse effects of the imbalance. Physicians who are engaged simultaneously in the clinical practice of medicine, in professional education, and in medical research must participate in meeting the health care needs both for a number of patients and for specific, unusual patients so as to satisfy their professional needs. In general, individuals who need health care want the cost to be minimized and, so, place constraints on the amount of resources they are willing to expend for this purpose. As a practical expediency, this discussion emphasizes the problems of excess demand for specific services of hospital beds and operating room time. It is suggested that the manner in which these specific services are utilized is fundamental to the simultaneous satisfaction of the needs of the patient and the physician and is representative of how we expect to extend this program to include other services, such as professional staff, operating room staff and inpatient nursing staff.