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An overbooking scheduling model for outpatient appointments in a multi-provider clinic
Publication date: Available online 24 June 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Moh’d El-Sharo , Bichen Zheng , Sang Won Yoon , Mohammad T. Khasawneh In general, most outpatient clinics are staffed by more than one provider in order to satisfy high patient demand and distribute the overall workload. Although several overbooking scheduling models have been proposed in the literature for single-provider settings, it would be difficult to extend and apply them directly to a multi-provider setting. This research proposes an overbooking scheduling model for multiple-provider clinics to optimize t...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - June 26, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A network flow model for inventory management and distribution of influenza vaccines through a healthcare supply chain
Publication date: Available online 24 June 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Sharon Hovav , Dmitry Tsadikovich Influenza epidemics impose great losses in both human and financial terms. Billions of dollars are spent annually on vaccination programs aimed at fighting seasonal influenza outbreaks. A key question arising in large-scale vaccination programs is how to minimize the program costs while maintaining a required standard of public benefits. We suggest an operational research approach for solving this problem using supply chain concepts and techniques. Specifically, we consider a constra...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - June 26, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Workflow optimization for robotic stereotactic radiotherapy treatments: Application of Constant Work In Progress workflow
We present an application of the industrial Constant-Work-In-Progress (ConWIP) principle to radiotherapy treatments: from Operations Research to application in practice. Radiotherapy involves a chain of preparation steps before treatment. The time periods between patient referral, initial Computed Tomography (CT) scan, and the treatment should always be as short as possible. This is important in order to not allow further tumor growth and to capture the correct patient anatomy for the treatment. Therefore, the high-in-demand limited machine capacity and scheduling of intermediate steps have to be balanced. Conventionally, ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - June 19, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Assessment of a Brazilian public hospital’s performance for management purposes: A soft operations research case in action
This article uses the MultiCriteria Decision Aid (MCDA) approach to support the development of a model that can help the university hospitals’ managers assess their institutional performance to meet their joint goals with the MS/MEC and obtain the certification. This case study was conducted at a hospital within the Brazilian federal education network. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - May 24, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Modeling the effect of short stay units on patient admissions
Publication date: Available online 29 April 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Maartje E. Zonderland , Richard J. Boucherie , Michael W. Carter , David A. Stanford Two purposes of Short Stay Units (SSU) are the reduction of Emergency Department crowding and increased urgent patient admissions. At an SSU urgent patients are temporarily held until they either can go home or transferred to an inpatient ward. In this paper we present an overflow model to evaluate the effect of employing a SSU on elective and urgent patient admissions. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 29, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Constraint generation methods for robust optimization in radiation therapy
Publication date: Available online 6 April 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Houra Mahmoudzadeh , Thomas G. Purdie , Timothy C.Y. Chan We develop a constraint generation solution method for robust optimization problems in radiation therapy in which the problems include a large number of robust constraints. Each robust constraint must hold for any realization of an uncertain parameter within a given uncertainty set. Because the problems are large scale, the robust counterpart is computationally challenging to solve. To address this challenge, we explore different strategies of adding constrai...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 6, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Optimal re-organization of a hemodynamics units system: A case study
Publication date: Available online 27 March 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Fabio Lazzaroni , Giovanni Righini We consider some optimization problems arising from the re-organization of a regional health care system concerning the treatment of patients affected by acute myocardial infarction (AMI). The study is focused on the reorganization of the system operations during the nights and the week-ends that are the most critical periods. This requires to optimize both strategic and tactic level decisions, where conflicting objectives must be taken into account because several stake-holders ar...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - March 27, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Forecasting demand for health services: Development of a publicly available toolbox
Publication date: Available online 20 March 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Mehdi Jalalpour , Yulia Gel , Scott Levin Efficient health care delivery systems aim to match resources to demand for services over time. Resource allocation decisions must be made under stochastic uncertainty. This includes uncertainty in the number of individuals (i.e., counts) in need of services over discrete time intervals. Examples include counts of patients arriving to emergency departments and counts of prescription medications distributed by pharmacies. Accurately forecasting count data in health care syst...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - March 20, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Modeling and simulation of a hospital evacuation before a forecasted flood
Publication date: Available online 25 February 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Wanying Chen , Alain Guinet , Angel Ruiz As high level emergencies can have serious consequences on hospital activities, an emergency management plan to face a crisis situation must be specified and assessed. Even though more and more research is devoted to this area, most studies are based on academic assumptions and the proposed improvement methods are difficult to apply in the real world. This paper deals with a hospital evacuation plan facing a flood based on a real life scenario. We modeled the evacuation p...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - February 26, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

An efficient heuristic for real-time ambulance redeployment
Publication date: Available online 28 January 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): C.J. Jagtenberg , S. Bhulai , R.D. van der Mei We address the problem of dynamic ambulance repositioning, in which the goal is to minimize the expected fraction of late arrivals. The decisions on how to redeploy the vehicles have to be made in real time, and may take into account the status of all other vehicles and accidents. This is generally considered a difficult problem, especially in urban areas, and exact solution methods quickly become intractable when the number of vehicles grows. Therefore, there is a n...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - February 3, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Health system modelling for policy development and evaluation: Using qualitative methods to capture the whole-system perspective
We present a multi-panel expert knowledge elicitation approach based on group model building principles. A use case concerning changes to rehabilitation patient flows in the hospital and community settings is discussed. It is concluded that qualitative whole-system modelling is a highly valuable but resource intensive approach to facilitate systems thinking for policy development. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - January 17, 2015 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

An analysis of overlapping appointment scheduling model in an outpatient clinic
Publication date: Available online 12 December 2014 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Kelsey Anderson , Bichen Zheng , Sang Won Yoon , Mohammad T. Khasawneh This research addresses an overlapping appointment scheduling (OLAS) model to minimize patient waiting time and doctor idle time in an outpatient healthcare clinic when a stochastic service time is considered. In general, outpatient clinics should determine proper appointment schedules for their patients to maximize doctor utilization and patient satisfaction. As a result, the OLAS model has been proposed to find the optimal overlap period b...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - December 18, 2014 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Drug-resistant tuberculosis in Mumbai, India: An agenda for operations research
Publication date: June–September 2012 Source:Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 1, Issues 2–3 Author(s): Nerges Mistry , Monica Tolani , David Osrin Operations research (OR) is well established in India and is also a prominent feature of the global and local agendas for tuberculosis (TB) control. India accounts for a quarter of the global burden of TB and of new cases. Multidrug-resistant TB is a significant problem in Mumbai, India’s most populous city, and there have been recent reports of totally resistant TB. Much thought has been given to the role of OR in addressing programmatic challenges, by b...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 25, 2014 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Handling uncertainty in health care management using the cardinality-constrained approach: Advantages and remarks
Publication date: Available online 8 November 2014 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Bernardetta Addis , Giuliana Carello , Andrea Grosso , Ettore Lanzarone , Sara Mattia , Elena Tànfani Different approaches have been proposed in the literature to handle uncertain parameters in health care optimisation problems. Among them, the cardinality-constrained approach to robust optimisation seems suitable for handling several of these problems because it allows a trade-off between the level of robustness and the cost of the solution, and an easy implementation that can be understood by clinicians and...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 20, 2014 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

The top ten global health supply chain issues: Perspectives from the field
Publication date: December 2014 Source:Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 3, Issue 4 Author(s): Natalie Privett , David Gonsalvez In the battle for global health, supply chains are often found wanting. Yet most of what is known about in-country pharmaceutical supply chains resides in the experiences of individual stakeholders, with limited amounts of this knowledge captured in technical reports and papers. This short communication taps into the collective experience and wisdom of global health supply chain professionals through interviews and surveys to identify and prioritize the top 10 global health pharma...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 20, 2014 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research