COVID-19 scenario modelling for the mitigation of capacity-dependent deaths in intensive care
AbstractManaging healthcare demand and capacity is especially difficult in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where limited intensive care resources can be overwhelmed by a large number of cases requiring admission in a short space of time. If patients are unable to access this specialist resource, then death is a likely outcome. In appreciating these ‘capacity-dependent’ deaths, this paper reports on the clinically-led development of a stochastic discrete event simulation model designed to capture the key dynamics of the intensive care admissions process for COVID-19 patients. With application to a large public hos...
Source: Health Care Management Science - July 7, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
A stochastic risk-averse framework for blood donation appointment scheduling under uncertain donor arrivals
AbstractBlood is a key resource in all health care systems, usually drawn from voluntary donors. We focus on the operations management in blood collection centers, which is a key step to guarantee an adequate blood supply and a good quality of service to donors, by addressing the so-called Blood Donation Appointment Scheduling problem. Its goal is to employ appointment scheduling to balance the production of blood units between days, in order to provide a reasonably constant supply to transfusion centers and hospitals, and reduce non-alignments between physicians ’ working times and donor arrivals at the collection cente...
Source: Health Care Management Science - June 30, 2020 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Radiotherapy treatment scheduling considering time window preferences
In this study, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model that solves the problem of scheduling and sequencing RT sessions considering time window preferences given by patients. The MILP model alone is able to solve the problem to optimality, scheduling all sessions within the desired window, in reasonable time for small size instances up to 66 patients and 2 linacs per week. For larger centers, we propose a heuristic method that pre-assigns patients to linacs to decompose the problem in subproblems (clusters of linacs) before using the MILP model to solve the subproblems to optimality in a sequential manne...
Source: Health Care Management Science - June 26, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
How efficient are surgical treatments in Japan? The case of a high-volume Japanese hospital
AbstractJapan ’s healthcare expenditures, which are largely publicly funded, have been growing dramatically due to the rapid aging of the population as well as the innovation and diffusion of new medical technologies. Annual costs for surgical treatments are estimated to be approximately USD 20 billion. Using u nique longitudinal clinical data at the individual surgeon level, this study aims to estimate the technical efficiency of surgical treatments across surgical specialties in a high-volume Japanese teaching hospital by employing stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) with production frontier models. We si multaneously e...
Source: Health Care Management Science - June 22, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Advancing evidence-based healthcare facility design: a systematic literature review
AbstractHealthcare facility design is a complex process that brings together diverse stakeholders and ideally aligns operational, environmental, experiential, clinical, and organizational objectives. The challenges inherent in facility design arise from the dynamic and complex nature of healthcare itself, and the growing accountability to the quadruple aims of enhancing patient experience, improving population health, reducing costs, and improving staff work life. Many healthcare systems and design practitioners are adopting an evidence-based approach to facility design, defined broadly as basing decisions about the built ...
Source: Health Care Management Science - May 23, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Brazilian hospitals ’ performance: an assessment of the unified health system (SUS)
AbstractThis paper assesses the economic efficiency of Brazilian general hospitals that provide inpatient care for the Unified Health System (SUS). We combined data envelopment analysis (DEA) and spatial analysis to identify predominant clusters, measure hospital inefficiency and analyze the spatial pattern of inefficiency throughout the country. Our findings pointed to a high level of hospital inefficiency, mostly associated with small size and distributed across all Brazilian states. Many of these hospitals could increase production and reduce inputs to achieve higher efficiency standards. These findings suggest room for...
Source: Health Care Management Science - May 5, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Containing 2019-nCoV (Wuhan) coronavirus
AbstractThe novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV first appeared in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. While most of the initial cases were linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, person-to-person transmission has been verified. Given that a vaccine cannot be developed and deployed for at least a year, preventing further transmission relies upon standard principles of containment, two of which are the isolation of known cases and the quarantine of persons believed at high risk of exposure. This note presents probability models for assessing the effectiveness of case isolation and quarantine within a community during the initial p...
Source: Health Care Management Science - March 6, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Designing schedule configuration of a hybrid appointment system for a two-stage outpatient clinic with multiple servers
AbstractEven though several clinics serve patients in more than one stage (e.g., visit nurse and then visit doctor) and employ multiple providers in each stage, most of the previous work on appointment system design considers a simplified single-stage single-server clinic. Motivated by a real-life clinic setting, this paper aims to determine the schedule configuration of a hybrid appointment system (i.e., the number of pre-booking and same-day time slots reserved for a physician along with their positions in the schedule) for a two-stage multi-server clinic. A stochastic optimization model is developed to obtain a schedule...
Source: Health Care Management Science - February 19, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Welcome message from the new editor
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Source: Health Care Management Science - February 13, 2020 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
A novel approach for breast cancer prediction using optimized ANN classifier based on big data environment
AbstractCancer is caused by the un-controlled division of abnormal cells in a body part. Various cancers exist in this world and one amongst them is breast cancer. Breast cancer (BC) threatens the lives of people and today, it is the secondary prime cause of death in women. Numerous research directions concentrated on the prediction of BC. The prevailing prediction model is time-consuming and have less accuracy. To trounce those drawbacks, this paper proposed a BC prediction system (BCPS) utilizing Optimized Artificial Neural Network (OANN). Primarily, the unprocessed BC data are regarded as the input. The big data (BD) st...
Source: Health Care Management Science - November 4, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
WIT120 data mining technology based on internet of things
AbstractIn recent years, with the increasing aging of society, the number of patients with chronic heart disease, hypertension and diabetes has increased dramatically. It has guiding significance for the prevention and treatment by long-term monitoring of the physiological signs of patients with chronic diseases, scoring statistical data, and predicting the development trend of users ’ health. The work used the data collected by WIT120 system to analyze the pre-processed thick data based on adaptive k-means clustering method under the MapReduce framework, and the GM (1,1) grey model was used to predict the future health ...
Source: Health Care Management Science - September 13, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Patient classification based on volume and case-mix in the emergency department and their association with performance
AbstractPredicting daily patient volume is necessary for emergency department (ED) strategic and operational decisions, such as resource planning and workforce scheduling. For these purposes, forecast accuracy requires understanding the heterogeneity among patients with respect to their characteristics and reasons for visits. To capture the heterogeneity among ED patients (case-mix), we present a patient coding and classification scheme (PCCS) based on patient demographics and diagnostic information. The proposed PCCS allows us to mathematically formalize the arrival patterns of the patient population as well as each class...
Source: Health Care Management Science - August 23, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Prediction of emergency department patient disposition decision for proactive resource allocation for admission
AbstractWe investigate the capability of information from electronic health records of an emergency department (ED) to predict patient disposition decisions for reducing “boarding” delays through the proactive initiation of admission processes (e.g., inpatient bed requests, transport, etc.). We model the process of ED disposition decision prediction as a hierarchical multiclass classification while dealing with the progressive accrual of clinical information thr oughout the ED caregiving process. Multinomial logistic regression as well as machine learning models are built for carrying out the predictions. Utilizing res...
Source: Health Care Management Science - August 22, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Acknowledgement of referees ’ services
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Source: Health Care Management Science - August 4, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
Farewell message from editor-in-chief
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Source: Health Care Management Science - August 4, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research
