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Supporting healthy route choice for commuter cyclists: The trade-off between travel time and pollutant dose
Publication date: Available online 14 April 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Judith Y.T. Wang, Kim N. Dirks, Matthias Ehrgott, Jon Pearce, Alan K.L. Cheung Cyclists form the most vulnerable road user group in terms of injury from traffic accidents, as well as exposure to traffic-related air pollution. Ironically, commuter cyclists are often motivated by improvement in health and fitness. Cycleways away from traffic with lower concentrations of pollutants from motorised vehicles sometimes result in longer distances and hence require longer travel times, while alternative routes sharing the r...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 15, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Queue length computation of time-dependent queueing networks and its application to blood collection
The objective of the results is twofold: (1) to show that the time-dependent queueing network approach is imperative for some queueing networks, including this application and (2) to evaluate possible improvement scenarios for Dutch blood collection sites that can only be properly assessed with a time-dependent queueing method. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A structured literature review of simulation modelling applied to Emergency Departments: Current patterns and emerging trends
We present a selection of case studies to illustrate both our classification and findings, and suggest directions for further research. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

An integrated Emergency Care Delivery System for major events
The objective of this paper is to evaluate the Emergency Care Delivery System of the city of Rio de Janeiro in view of recent urban and natural disasters that are happening everywhere and to support the organizer Committee of RIO 2016 Olympic Games. The goal is to discuss the effectivity of an intelligent decision support system that involves three public agencies: The Control Centre of the ambulance service, the Municipal Traffic Engineering Company and the Centre for Internal Regulation of public hospitals. The model is based upon the information flow focusing on the high complexity patients. The emergency care delivery ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A multi-period location-allocation model for nursing home network planning under uncertainty
We present a strategic model in which the improvement of service accessibility through the planning horizon is appropriately addressed. Unlike previous research, the proposed model modifies the allocation pattern to prevent unacceptable deterioration of the accessibility criterion. In addition, the problem is formulated as a covering model in which the capacity of facilities as well as the demand elasticity are considered. The uncertainty in demands within each time period is captured by adopting a distributionally robust approach. The model is then applied to a real case study for nursing home planning network in Shiraz c...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Modeling and analysis of short-term work planning in inpatient care settings
Publication date: Available online 3 February 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Lucy G. Aragon, Laila Cure, Ewing Tiong, Rita Bush This paper uses operations research (OR) to investigate inpatient care work planning decisions from the perspective of a single healthcare provider in a hospital unit. While there has been considerable research on the modeling and analysis of healthcare delivery systems to support medium- to long-term decisions (e.g., daily operating room scheduling, weekly nurse scheduling), there is little research focusing on decisions made at the operational level by front-lin...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A stochastic model to minimize patient waiting time in an emergency department
Publication date: Available online 10 February 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Dorsaf Daldoul, Issam Nouaouri, Hanen Bouchriha, Hamid Allaoui The hospital emergency department (ED), which constitutes a complex system with random demands, is the primary facility for urgent health issues. Overcrowding and the limited resources affect the waiting time of patients in the ED. In this research, we model the healthcare services in the ED of a university hospital in Tunisia. We consider simultaneously six patient queues. The goal is to optimize the human and material resources required to reduce th...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A memetic algorithm for a home health care routing and scheduling problem
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 16 Author(s): Jérémy Decerle, Olivier Grunder, Amir Hajjam El Hassani, Oussama Barakat This work addresses a home health care routing and scheduling problem with time window and synchronization constraints. Each patient is associated with a period of availability according to their preferences while some visits may require the presence of two staff members simultaneously, which requires the synchronization of two visits. In this paper, the problem is studied with hard and soft patients time window and synchronization constraints. We dev...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A carve-out model for primary care appointment scheduling with same-day requests and no-shows
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 16 Author(s): Babak Hoseini, Wenbo Cai, Layek Abdel-Malek We develop a stochastic model for a carve-out appointment system for a single physician in a primary care facility that allocates certain slots for same-day requests while reserving the rest for appointments requested in advance. Several slots are double-booked to mitigate the negative impacts from no-shows. Our model takes into account the stochastic demands of both routine patients and same-day requests as well as no-shows and optimizes the overall system performance, which includ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Operational research applied to health services: Finding better health-care decisions in new oceans of health data
Publication date: Available online 2 March 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Fermin Mallor, Sally Brailsford, Marion Rauner, Cristina Azcarate (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Adapting GA to solve a novel model for operating room scheduling problem with endogenous uncertainty
Publication date: Available online 5 March 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): F. Hooshmand, S.A. MirHassani, A. Akhavein This paper addresses a new variant of the daily operating room scheduling problem in which, surgeries have stochastic durations, and in order to get a more flexible schedule, the initial scheduling and the rescheduling decisions are simultaneously considered within a single optimization model. The main point in the formulation of this problem is that the time of the uncertainty realization is decision dependent and hence, the uncertainty is of endogenous nature which is a new...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Iterative conceptual modeling: A case study in cardiac patient survival simulation
Publication date: Available online 9 March 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Roger McHaney, Iris Reychav, Lin Zhu, Megan McHaney Lindstrom, Yaron Arbel Iterative conceptual modeling techniques were used to abstract a computer model of emergency department patient characteristics from a medical dataset. This research effort focused on unbalanced medical data then developed and defined a simulation of cardiac patient survival. The approach focused on desired real-world outcomes for the model. Specifically, iterative conceptual modeling ensured alignment between real-world needs and model devel...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Streamlining pathways for minor injuries in emergency departments through radiographer-led discharge
In this study, we model patient pathways through an emergency department (ED) at a hospital in the South West of England using process mapping, interviews with ED staff and discrete event simulation (DES). The DES model allowed us to compare the current practice at the hospital with scenarios using radiographer-led discharge of patients directly after imaging and assess the reduction in patients’ length of stay in ED. We also quantified trade-offs between the provision of radiographer-led discharge and its effects, i.e. reduction in waiting times and ED workload. Finally, we discuss how this decision support tool can be ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Shelf-space optimization models in decentralized automated dispensing cabinets
Publication date: Available online 5 April 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Nazanin Esmaili, Bryan A. Norman, Jayant Rajgopal We propose a mixed integer programming (MIP) model to help clinicians store medications and medical supplies optimally in space-constrained, decentralized Automated Dispensing Cabinets (ADCs) located on hospital patient floors. We also propose a second MIP model that addresses human errors associated with the selection of pharmaceuticals from floor storage, and not only selects the best set of medications for storage but also determines their optimal layout within the ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Duty rostering for physicians at a department of orthopedics and trauma surgery
Publication date: Available online 5 April 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Clemens Thielen This paper presents a case study of duty rostering for physicians at a department of orthopedics and trauma surgery. We provide a detailed description of the rostering problem faced and present an integer programming model that has been used in practice for creating duty rosters at the department for more than a year. Using real world data, we compare the model output to a manually generated roster as used previously by the department and analyze the quality of the rosters generated by the model over a l...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research