Operations Research for Health Care 
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This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.Multi-dose vial administration with non-stationary demand and delayed service
Publication date: Available online 6 April 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Maryam Mofrad, Lisa M. Maillart, Bryan A. Norman, Jayant Rajgopal To vaccinate patients arriving to clinics in remote locations, clinicians reconstitute vials containing multiple doses of lyophilized vaccines, but often only partially use the vials by the end of the vaccination session. The unused doses are discarded and termed “open vial waste.” Current practice is typically to vaccinate all patients as long as there is inventory on-hand, which results in significant open vial waste. Previous work on determining...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
A case study of nonlinear programming approach for repeated testing of HIV in a population stratified by subpopulations according to different risks of new infections
Publication date: Available online 9 April 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Ping Yan, Fan Zhang Motivated by the vision of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS that 90% of people living with HIV will be diagnosed by year 2020, we present an optimization framework regarding repeated testing of an infectious disease which is transmitted unevenly in the population. A subset of HIV surveillance data in Canada with detailed and compatible variables is pooled for statistical analysis. The study population is Men having Sex with Men (MSM) in Canada from the pooled data. Estimated parameters...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Evaluating the impact of optimization algorithms for patient transits dispatching using discrete event simulation
We present a set of algorithms with varying complexity, ranging from simple heuristics to the use of critical path methods to combine mixed integer formulations for the separated orderly and nurse problems. To address a transit service’s stochasticity, volatility and the resulting need for constant re-optimization, we embed the optimization algorithms in a discrete event simulation to evaluate their performance under realistic circumstances. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 14, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Trade-off between stakeholders ’ goals in the home care nurse-to-patient assignment problem
Publication date: Available online 6 January 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Giuliana Carello, Ettore Lanzarone, Sara Mattia Three stakeholders are involved in health care services: patients, operators and service provider managers. They usually have conflicting needs: patients aim at obtaining good quality of service, operators require fair workloads, and managers try to reduce costs. Moreover, a fourth stakeholder, i.e., the contracting authority, pays for the service and fixes the requirements in terms of costs, quality of service and working conditions, to guarantee that the needs of the...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - January 6, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Why the distribution matters: Using discrete event simulation to demonstrate the impact of the distribution of procedure times on hospital operating room utilisation and average procedure cost
Conclusion: Simple approaches to estimating procedure costs may under-estimate resource consumption and do so in a way that is biased against technologies with shorter and more predictable procedure duration. For health technology decisions where a substantial part of costs are OR resources, a more sophisticated approach, taking account of the real-world implications of the distribution of procedure durations, should be used to avoid potential bias. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - December 24, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Cost of surgical site infection in Egyptian University Hospital: Informing a decision to implement an infection control program using simulation
Publication date: Available online 22 November 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Ghada Ahmed Abu-Sheasha, Omaima Gaber Yassine, Medhat Mohamed Anwar, Ramez Naguib Bedwani Objective To estimate the cost of surgical site infection in the Medical Research Institute hospital from the patient and hospital perspectives using simulation. The cost was estimated to support a decision on which infection control strategy to implement from strategies with different efficacies and costs. Methods Two economic models were developed to estimate the cost of surgical site infection, from hospital and patient ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - December 16, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Integrated scheduling of tasks and gynecologists to improve patient appointment scheduling; a case study
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 16 Author(s): N.M. van de Vrugt, S.T. Luen-English, W.A.P. Bastiaansen, S. Kleinluchtenbeld, W.T.P. Lardinois, M.H. Pots, D.J. Schoonbergen, E.W. Hans, J.L. Hurink, R.J. Boucherie Like many hospital departments, the gynecology department of the Jeroen Bosch Hospital experienced difficulties with scheduling outpatient appointments at the medically preferred times. Despite the time invested in creating the schedule, the compliance of the achieved schedules with the preferences of gynecologists is low, and the number of scheduled outpa...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - December 16, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
A successive LP approach with C-VaR type constraints for IMRT optimization
Publication date: Available online 19 October 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Shogo Kishimoto, Makoto Yamashita In this paper, we propose a successive linear programming (LP) approach for an intensity-modulated radiotherapy treatment (IMRT) optimization. The use of IMRT enables to control the beam intensities accurately and gives more flexibility for cancer treatment plans, but finding a feasible plan that satisfies all dose-volume constraints (DVCs) requires expensive computation cost. Romeijn et al. (2003) replaced the DVCs with C-VaR (conditional Value-at-Risk) type constraints, and succes...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 17, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Discrete event simulation model for planning Level 2 “step-down” bed needs using NEMS
Publication date: Available online 1 November 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): F. Rodrigues, G.S. Zaric, D.A. Stanford In highly congested hospitals it may be common for patients to overstay at Intensive Care Units (ICU) due to blockages and imbalances in capacity. This is inadequate clinically, as patients occupy a service they no longer need; operationally, as it disrupts flow from upstream units; and financially as ICU beds are more expensive than ward beds. Step-down beds, also known as Level 2 beds, have become an increasingly popular and less expensive alternative to ICU beds to deal wi...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 17, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Healthcare technology assessment under uncertainty: The case of the digital medical linear accelerators
Publication date: Available online 11 November 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): A. Oliveira, J. Zambujal-Oliveira Medical device replacement decisions have considerable impact on the budget management and service quality levels of healthcare institutions, being particularly complex for modeling. In that sense, this paper develops a framework to support the decision-making process, employing cost analysis methods and shows evidence of the low relevance of operating and maintenance costs and the significance of innovative variables, such as the penalty costs, which valorise the pecuniary losses ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 17, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
How can decision makers be supported in the improvement of an emergency department? A simulation, optimization and data mining approach
This article presents a novel approach in healthcare in which Discrete Event Simulation, Simulation-Based Multi-Objective Optimization and Data Mining techniques are used in combination. This methodology has been applied for a system improvement analysis in a Swedish emergency department. As a result of the project, the decision makers were provided with a range of nearly optimal solutions and design rules which reduce considerably the length of stay and waiting times for emergency department patients. These solutions include the optimal number of resources and the required level of improvement in key processes. The articl...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 17, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Hospital competition in prices and quality: A variational inequality framework
Publication date: Available online 13 October 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Anna Nagurney, Karen Li In this paper, we construct a game theory model to capture competition among hospitals for patients for their medical procedures. The utility functions of the hospitals contain a revenue component and a component due to altruism benefit. The hospitals compete in prices charged to paying patients as well as in the quality levels of their procedures. Both prices and quality levels are subject to lower and upper bounds. We state the governing Nash equilibrium conditions and provide the variation...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 14, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
A novel mathematical model for group purchasing in healthcare
Publication date: Available online 14 October 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Abdul Sattar Safaei, Farnaz Heidarpoor, Mohammad Mahdi Paydar Supply chain management is a set of guidelines for integration of chains, which aims to diminish costs and increase system services to customers. One of the most substantial aspects for supply chain stockholders is purchasing requested items in a timely manner. Thus, a variety of models have been proposed as purchasing strategy in supply chains. Group purchasing is a system which encourages retailers to offer better discounts by ordering large quantities...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 14, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
An optimization model for scheduling patients in destination medical centers
The objectives of this research is two-fold: (1) minimize the deviation from patient’s preferred start time, and (2) minimize the inter-waiting time between procedures of patients at a destination medical center. This scheduling problem is modeled as a non-permutation hybrid flow shop with an assumption that providers have specific periods of unavailability. The research problem is known to be NP-hard. Therefore, a hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm equipped with local search and a heuristic mining algorithm is proposed to reach a near-optimal solution efficiently. The parameters of the algorithms are first tun...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 10, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Applying Gravity model to predict demand of public hospital beds
Publication date: Available online 9 October 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Kiok Liang Teow, Kelvin Bryan Tan, Hwee Pin Phua, Zhu Zhecheng Singapore is an urban country of about 700 km2 with a total population of 5.6 million. In 2015, Ng Teng Fong General Hospital (NTFGH) became the 7th public acute general hospital to provide multi-disciplinary acute inpatient, specialist outpatient clinic services (SOC) and a 24-hour emergency department (ED). To prepare for increasing inpatient demand resulting from ageing and population growth, Singapore has planned for two more public hospitals to be ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 10, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
