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Minimizing operational costs by restructuring the blood sample collection chain
Publication date: Available online 11 September 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Amir Elalouf, Sharon Hovav, Dmitry Tsadikovich, Liron Yedidsion This work focuses on improving the structure of a three-echelon blood sample collection chain operated by a health maintenance organization. The chain comprises clinics, where samples are collected from patients; centrifuge centers, where blood is separated into its components; and a centralized testing laboratory, where samples are analyzed. Under the assumption that some clinics can be provided with in-house centrifugation facilities instead...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - September 11, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Ambulance location under stochastic demand: A sampling approach
Publication date: Available online 1 September 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Stefan Nickel, Melanie Reuter-Oppermann, Francisco Saldanha-da-Gama In this paper, we investigate the problem of choosing the location and number of ambulances and their bases in a certain region. The goal is to minimize the total cost for installing (and maintaining) these facilities but assuring a minimum coverage level. Demand is assumed to be stochastic. A scenario-indexed formulation is considered for the problem. By using a small illustrative example we show that even when demand can be captured by a fi...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - September 2, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

An alternative scheduling approach for improving patient-flow in emergency departments
Publication date: Available online 28 August 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Amir Elalouf, Guy Wachtel Overcrowding in hospitals, along with long lengths of stay, high arrival rates, budget constraints, and increasing demand for high service quality, create challenges for the work-flow and patient flow of hospital emergency departments (EDs). This paper proposes an algorithmic approach that seeks to enable ED decision makers (specifically, in the triage) to optimally schedule evaluations for patients who are waiting for treatment in the ED. The algorithm is an expansion of Karp’s job se...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 28, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Time-dependent stochastic methods for managing and scheduling Emergency Medical Services
This article focuses in particular on the operations of the Welsh Ambulance Service Trust (WAST), which is the only organisation that provides urgent paramedical care services on a day-to-day basis across the whole of Wales. In response to WAST’s aspiration to improve the quality of care it provides, this research investigates several interrelated advanced statistical and operational research (OR) methods, culminating in a suite of decision support tools to aid WAST with capacity planning issues. The developed techniques are integrated in a master workforce capacity planning tool that may be independently operated by WAS...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 25, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Linear formulation for the Maximum Expected Coverage Location Model with fractional coverage
Publication date: Available online 21 August 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): P.L. van den Berg, G.J. Kommer, B. Zuzáková Since ambulance providers are responsible for life-saving medical care at the scene in emergency situations and since response times are important in these situations, it is crucial that ambulances are located in such a way that good coverage is provided throughout the region. Most models that are developed to determine good base locations assume strict 0–1 coverage given a fixed base location and demand point. However, multiple applications require fractional cov...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 22, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Simulation Modelling and Analysis of appointment system performance for multiple classes of patients in a hospital: A case study
Publication date: Available online 21 August 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Papiya Bhattacharjee, Pradip Kumar Ray Appointment systems for scheduling patients to a hospital facility play an important role in controlling and synchronizing the arrival of patients with resource availability thereby reducing the waiting time of patients and increasing the utilization of resources. In this paper, hospital appointment systems with multiple classes of patients are considered where different classes of patients may vary in punctuality, no-show probabilities, mean service times and service time v...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 22, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Reducing access times for radiation treatment by aligning the doctor’s schemes
The objective of this study is to increase compliance to access time standards without extending resource capacities, by developing a methodology for optimizing resource capacity allocation in the radiotherapy care process. For radiotherapy, time division of resources over different activities particularly applies to the doctors, who carry out consultations and scan contouring. Time slots for these activities are typically set for each doctor in a cyclic weekly scheme. We develop an integer linear programming (ILP) model to design a weekly doctors’ scheme that minimizes the expected access times of all patient types in t...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 15, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Ranking risk exposures for situational surveillance of falls with sensors
Publication date: Available online 13 August 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Alla Kammerdiner Falls pose a significant public health problem. The usefulness of wearable sensors for detection of falls is well-known. We propose a novel optimization-based approach that was formulated for ranking exposures to falls using information streamed from multiple sensors. Our method incorporates statistical estimation. We illustrate our technique on synthetic data. Future research is aimed at assessing the validity of this new method. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 14, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Coexistence of two dengue virus serotypes and forecasting for Madeira Island
Publication date: Available online 11 August 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Filipa Portugal Rocha, Helena Sofia Rodrigues, M. Teresa T. Monteiro, Delfim F.M. Torres The first outbreak of dengue occurred in Madeira Island on 2012, featuring one virus serotype. Aedes aegypti was the vector of the disease and it is unlikely that it will be eliminated from the island. Therefore, a new outbreak of dengue fever can occur and, if it happens, risk to the population increases if two serotypes coexist. In this paper, mathematical modeling and numerical simulations are carried out to forecast w...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 12, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Bicriteria elective surgery scheduling using an evolutionary algorithm
This study presents a powerful method with potential to improve the delivery of surgical activity in the hospital under study. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 12, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Using the hidden Markov model to capture quality of care in Lombardy geriatric wards
Publication date: Available online 10 August 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Hannah Mitchell, Adele H. Marshall, Mariangela Zenga Quality of care is an important aspect of healthcare monitoring, which is used to ensure that the healthcare system is delivering care of the highest standard. With populations growing older there is an increased urgency in making sure that the healthcare delivered is of the highest standard. Healthcare providers are under increased pressure to ensure that this is the case with public and government demand expecting a healthcare system of the highest quality....
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 11, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Proactive on-call scheduling during a seasonal epidemic
Publication date: Available online 10 August 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Omar El-Rifai, Thierry Garaix, Xiaolan Xie Overcrowding in Emergency Departments (EDs) is particularly problematic during seasonal epidemic crises. Each year during this period, EDs set off recourse actions to cope with the increase in workload. Uncertainty in the length and amplitude of epidemics make managerial decisions difficult. We propose in this study a staff allocation model to manage the situation using on-calls. An on-call scheduling policy is proposed to best balance between demand coverage and labor...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 11, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Assigning treatment rooms at the Emergency Department
Publication date: Available online 7 August 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Maartje van de Vrugt, Richard J. Boucherie Increasing efficiency at the Emergency Department (ED) reduces overcrowding. At the ED in typical Dutch Hospitals treatment rooms are mostly shared by two residents of different specialties: a Surgeon and an Internist. Each resident uses multiple rooms in parallel; while one patient awaits test results in a treatment room, the resident visits other patients. The assignment of rooms among the residents is often unbalanced, which affects the blocking probability and waiting...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 9, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Trade-offs in operating room planning for electives and emergencies: A review
Publication date: Available online 3 July 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Carla Van Riet , Erik Demeulemeester The planning of the operating rooms (ORs) is a difficult process due to the different stakeholders involved. The real complexity, however, results from various sources of variability. This variability cannot be ignored since it greatly influences the trade-offs between the hospital costs and the patient waiting times. As a result, a need for policies guiding the OR manager in handling the trade-offs arises. Therefore, researchers have investigated different possibilities to incorpo...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 4, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Task scheduling in long-term care facilities: A client-centered approach
In this study, we analyze a task scheduling problem with small time windows and care workers with different levels of qualification in a nursing home. A set of care tasks has to be assigned to a given number of care workers, so that the total earliness and tardiness from the nursing home residents’ preferred time is minimized. To optimally solve this scheduling problem, we formulate a mixed integer program (MIP) and develop a dynamic programming (DP) approach. The numerical analysis shows the reliability of this optimization approach as well as of a heuristic DP approach. A sensitivity analysis with real-world demand dat...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 2, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research