Operations Research for Health Care 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.

Improving same-day access in primary care
Publication date: Available online 9 October 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Matthias Schacht A concept for the optimal configuration and capacity allocation for appointment systems in primary care is presented. It is designed to provide decision-support for primary care clinics to cope with seasonal variations in patient load in order to assure a high accessibility to health care services. The central aspect of the concept is a stochastic MILP for the determination of an appointment scheduling setup configuration, which is defined by the allocation of walk-in and pre-scheduled appointment blo...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 10, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Home health-care network design: Location and configuration of home health-care centers
This article accomplishes two main objectives: (i) design a home health-care network by locating HHC centers across a territory, taking into account medical demand and costs of resources and facilities; (ii) optimally manage the activities of HHC centers by deciding on the outsourcing of critical processes for patient care. Two mixed-integer linear programs are proposed to solve these problems and propose strategic and tactical decisions. A practical case study is proposed on the Loire department (France) with various scenarios to test the robustness of the model depending on demand variation. The proposed method gives e...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 5, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Blood inventory management in hospitals: Considering supply and demand uncertainty and blood transshipment possibility
This study will account for the fact that blood demand and supply are uncertain, and blood transshipment is possible. The proposed model considers the substitution relations among various blood types in the blood transfusion process to minimize blood shortage and wastage. Since the proposed model contains uncertain parameters, the use of chance constraint programming creates a deterministic counterpart. The deterministic model is then adapted to include approximations to remove non-linearity. Finally, a numerical experiment is designed to exhibit the model’s results and analyze the influence of different parameters on bl...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 3, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A framework to accelerate simulation studies of hyperacute stroke systems
Publication date: Available online 21 September 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Thomas Monks, Durk-Jouke van der Zee, Maarten Lahr, Michael Allen, Kerry Pearn, Martin A. James, Erik Buskens, Gert-Jan Luijckx Stroke care has been identified as an area where operations research has great potential. In recent years there has been a small but sustained stream of discrete-event simulation case studies in modelling hyperacute stroke systems. The nature of such case studies has led to a fragmented knowledge base and high entry cost to stroke modelling research. Two common issues have faced r...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - September 22, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A multiobjective stochastic genetic algorithm for the pareto-optimal prioritization scheme design of real-time healthcare resource allocation
Publication date: Available online 21 September 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Wen-Hsin Feng, Zhouyang Lou, Nan Kong, Hong Wan Many critical or even life-saving healthcare resources such as cadaveric donor organs are scarce. Upon procurement of such resources, some priority rule is applied to make the allocation decisions. In this paper, we consider the problem of optimally designing a single-score based priority rule to rank patients for each unit of available resource in real-time. We address the cases where multiple potentially conflicting objectives are simultaneously considered and th...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - September 22, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Development, implementation and evaluation of a tool for forecasting short term demand for beds in an intensive care unit
Publication date: Available online 14 September 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Christina Pagel, Victoria Banks, Catherine Pope, Pauline Whitmore, Katherine Brown, Allan Goldman, Martin Utley Variability in demand for staffed beds from existing patients and new referrals in intensive care units presents a substantial problem to managers. Short term fluctuations in the number of patients requiring a bed can result in demand for beds exceeding capacity, or alternatively, seemingly inefficient use of an expensive resource. While operational research methods can help in capacity planning, th...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - September 15, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Optimal control of intervention strategies and cost effectiveness analysis for a Zika virus model
Publication date: Available online 12 September 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Abdulfatai A. Momoh, Armin Fügenschuh This paper presents an optimal control strategy and a cost effectiveness analysis for the Zika virus disease. A mathematical model for the transmission of the Zika virus is considered with four preventive measures as control, namely: the use of treated bednets, the use of condoms, a medical treatment of infected persons, and the use of indoor residual spray (IRS). We obtain the reproduction number R 0 for the disease and carry out a stability analysis. We observe that the ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - September 13, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Unsupervised neural networks for clustering emergent patient flows
Publication date: Available online 26 August 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Marina Resta, Michele Sonnessa, Elena Tànfani, Angela Testi In recent years, hospitals increasingly faced with a growing proportion of their inpatient admissions coming from the fluctuating demand of emergency admissions. The opportunity to move emergency patients, with a decision to admit, out of an Emergency Department (ED) is linked to the ability of the hospital to actually receive them. Indeed, the growing concern on public budget constraints implies reducing the number of inpatient ward beds making crucial t...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 27, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A dynamic simulation –optimization approach for managing mass casualty incidents
We present a generic method consisting of (i) an automated policy for dynamic staff re-allocation at an AMP with arbitrary structure, and (ii) a simulation–optimization approach for optimally parametrizing this automated policy. Three simulation–optimization techniques with two complexity levels are investigated in detail for the purpose of incorporation in our system applied to the Austrian AMP case study: the method by Kiefer–Wolfowitz, the metaheuristic OptQuest approach, and the Response Surface Methodology. Our results show that the optimized automated policies can improve the performance of the AMP compared to ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 17, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Block scheduling at magnetic resonance imaging labs
Publication date: Available online 16 August 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Anders N. Gullhav, Marielle Christiansen, Bjørn Nygreen, Mats M. Aarlott, Jon Erik Medhus, Johan Skomsvoll, Per-Olav Østbyhaug This paper considers a tactical block scheduling problem at a major Norwegian hospital. Here, specific patient groups are reserved time blocks for scanning at a heterogeneous set of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) labs. The time blocks consist of several time slots, and one or more patients from the same group are scanned in a block. A total weekly number of time slots for each specif...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 17, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Mitigating overcrowding in emergency departments using Six Sigma and simulation: A case study in Egypt
Publication date: Available online 8 August 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Nemat A. Hussein, Tamer F. Abdelmaguid, Bassel S. Tawfik, Neamat G.S. Ahmed Overcrowding in emergency departments (EDs) is a serious problem that can harm patients and lead to negative operational and financial performances for hospitals. This paper integrates the Six Sigma methodology with discrete event simulation (DES) to guide improvement decisions, in which we target the reduction of overcrowding in EDs with a special attention on the medical equipment utilization and the influence of changing the medical equip...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 9, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

The development and practical application of a simulation model to inform musculoskeletal service delivery in an Australian public health service
Conclusions In the health system modelled, a significant gap was identified between future demand and current provision of services. Simulation modelling was able to assist service planners understand the demand and identify effective management strategies. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 6, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A dynamic simulation-optimization approach for managing mass casualty incidents
We present a generic method consisting of (i) an automated policy for dynamic staff re-allocation at an AMP with arbitrary structure, and (ii) a simulation-optimization approach for optimally parametrizing this automated policy. Three simulation-optimization techniques with two complexity levels are investigated in detail for the purpose of incorporation in our system applied to the Austrian AMP case study: the method by Kiefer-Wolfowitz, the metaheuristic OptQuest approach, and the Response Surface Methodology. Our results show that the optimized automated policies can improve the performance of the AMP compared to the ma...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 1, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A new sequential approach for chemotherapy treatment and facility operations planning
The objective of the developed models is to minimize the number of cancerous cells at the end of a planning horizon, idle/over staff working time and patients’ treatment delay. The results give the optimum starting days for new patients which achieve the best treatment plan. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 22, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

OR problems related to Home Health Care: A review of relevant routing and scheduling problems
Publication date: Available online 29 June 2017 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Mohamed Cissé, Semih Yalçındağ, Yannick Kergosien, Evren Şahin, Christophe Lenté, Andrea Matta The home health care routing and scheduling problem (HHCRSP) consists of designing a set of routes used by care workers to provide care to patients who live in the same geographic area and who must be treated at home. Hence, care activities, i.e., patient visits, must be planned to minimize measures, such as travel costs or to maximize the quality of service delivered to patients while respecting several constraints...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - June 30, 2017 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research