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Improving patient transportation in hospitals using a mixed-integer programming model
We present a mixed-integer model to determine the best distribution of the employees throughout the most popular routes of the hospital to minimize costs. Experiments are conducted on real data from CHU de Québec-Université Laval, HEJ, in the province of Québec, Canada. Results obtained from assigning specific employees to routes instead of the current method, which consists at assigning employees to all of the hospital are compared and show that there is a gain in doing so. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 29, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Review: Improving patient transportation in hospitals using a mixed-integer programming model
We present a mixed-integer model to determine the best distribution of the employees throughout the most popular routes of the hospital to minimize costs. Experiments are conducted on real data from CHU de Québec-Université Laval, HEJ, in the province of Québec, Canada. Results obtained from assigning specific employees to routes instead of the current method, which consists at assigning employees to all of the hospital are compared and show that there is a gain in doing so. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - August 22, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Adaptive operating rooms planning and scheduling: A rolling horizon approach
Publication date: Available online 25 July 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Mehdi A. Kamran, Behrooz Karimi, Nico Dellaert, Erik DemeulemeesterAbstractAccounting for a large portion of the hospital’s total revenue and cost, a better management of the operating rooms is extremely important in improving healthcare scheduling. This paper investigates the Operating Rooms (ORs)Planning and Scheduling Problem in a hospital with a modified block scheduling policy. Thus, the candidate patients have to be assigned a date and an operating room/block as well as being sequenced in the assigned operating room...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 26, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Optimal integration of desensitization protocols into kidney paired donation (KPD) programs
Publication date: Available online 26 July 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Fatemeh Karami, Monica Gentili, Mehdi Nayebpour, Naoru Koizumi, J. Keith MelanconAbstractBlood type (ABO) incompatibility and antibody to donor human leukocyte antigen (HLA) remain the most significant barriers in transplantation. While pre-transplant desensitization can be administered to overcome such incompatibilities between living donors and their kidney recipients, desensitization alone is likely to fail for those pairs with significant incompatibilities. For these pairs, desensitization can be administered in combina...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 26, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Chance-constrained admission scheduling of elective surgical patients in a dynamic, uncertain setting
Publication date: Available online 15 July 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Wim Vancroonenburg, Patrick De Causmaecker, Greet Vanden BergheAbstractIn the present contribution, a chance-constrained scheduling model is presented for determining admission dates of elective surgical patients. The admission scheduling model is defined considering a dynamic, stochastic decision-making environment. The primary aim of the model concerns the minimization of operating theatre costs and patient waiting times, while simultaneously avoiding bed shortages at a fixed certainty level through a chance-constrained f...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 16, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Minimizing Earliness/Tardiness costs on multiple machines with an application to surgery scheduling
Publication date: Available online 15 July 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Maarten Otten, Aleida Braaksma, Richard J. BoucherieAbstractEarly or tardy surgeries are frustrating for both patients and personnel, and cause inefficient use of resources at the operating rooms. The stochastic Earliness/Tardiness (E/T) scheduling problem addresses this by minimizing the total expected deviation of the surgery completion times from the planned completion times. We introduce the concept of E/T-concavity as a property of a probability distribution if the E/T costs are concave as a function of the standard de...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 16, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A comparison of population segmentation methods
Publication date: Available online 26 June 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): R.M. Wood, B.J. Murch, R.C. BetteridgeAbstractThis paper presents the first comparison of descriptive segmentation methods for population health management. The aim of descriptive segmentation is to identify heterogeneous segments according to some target observed measure. In healthcare it can be used to understand how utilisation is distributed among a population, and to identify the patient attributes which explain the greatest differences (knowledge of which can help shape segment-tailored services). In reviewing a numbe...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - June 27, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Editorial Board
Publication date: June 2019Source: Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 21Author(s): (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - June 20, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Examination-order scheduling for minimizing waiting time: A case study of a medical checkup
Publication date: Available online 14 May 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Mari Ito, Shizuka Hara, Mirai Tanaka, Ryuta TakashimaAbstractThis paper introduces a mathematical programming model and a heuristic method for examination-order scheduling in medical checkup. The purpose of this scheduling is to minimize the time spent waiting for medical examinations. We create the examination-order schedule based on the expected throughput of examinations. The obtained schedules improved efficiency by reducing the total time spent waiting. Comparisons with previously used scheduling methods demonstrate the...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - May 15, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Improving sustainability in a two-level pharmaceutical supply chain through Vendor-Managed Inventory system
This article aims to improve the sustainability of a pharmaceutical supply chain using a real case study. An analytical model is proposed to explore the effect of implementing a Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI) system in minimizing the quantity of the expired medications at hospitals. Further, a set of Monte-Carlo simulation tests are conducted to investigate the robustness of the VMI model under demand uncertainty. Experimental results on a real case study under deterministic demand show the efficiency of the VMI model in eliminating the amount of expired medications without compromising customer’s satisfaction. The resul...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - May 7, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Targeted multi-criteria optimisation in IMRT planning supplemented by knowledge based model creation
Publication date: Available online 7 May 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Katrin Teichert, Garry Currie, Karl-Heinz Küfer, Eliane Miguel-Chumacero, Philipp Süss, Michał Walczak, Suzanne CurrieAbstractIntensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) planning is an inherently multi-criteria task. A multi-criteria workflow (MCW) typically passes the following steps: create an optimisation model with multiple criteria, approximate the Pareto frontier, and visualize the generated plans to the decision-maker (DM) for inspection. This interactive plan selection and manipulation allow to create better treat...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - May 7, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Stakeholder involvement in drug inventory policies
Publication date: Available online 6 May 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Paola Cappanera, Maddalena Nonato, Roberta RossiAbstractThis paper experimentally investigates the relationships among three major stakeholders that are involved in drug inventory management at Intensive Care Units (ICUs), namely: i) nurses, who in person manage drug orders and carry out storage operations, ii) clinicians, who choose the therapy and shape demand, and iii) the hospital management, who is in charge of the economic sustainability of the hospital. As a case study, we consider the ICU ward of a major Italian publi...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - May 6, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Lognormal-based mixture models for robust fitting of hospital length of stay distributions
Publication date: Available online 8 April 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Xu Zhang, Sean Barnes, Bruce Golden, Miranda Myers, Paul SmithAbstractUnderstanding the structure of length of stay distributions can support operational and clinical decision making in hospitals. Our objective is to develop robust methods for fitting these length of stay distributions, which are often skewed and multimodal and contain a significant number of outliers. We define several lognormal-based mixture distributions with two components, one to fit the majority of observations and one to fit the abnormal observations...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 8, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Comparing Markov and non-Markov alternatives for cost-effectiveness analysis: Insights from a cervical cancer case
Publication date: Available online 3 April 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Cristina del Campo, Jiaru Bai, L. Robin KellerAbstractMarkov models allows medical prognosis to be modeled with health state transitions over time and is particularly useful for decisions regarding diseases where uncertain events and outcomes may occur. To provide sufficient detail for operations researchers to carry out a Markov analysis, we present a detailed example of a Markov model with five health states with monthly transitions with stationary transition probabilities between states to model the cost and effectivenes...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - April 4, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Forecasting arrivals and occupancy levels in an emergency department
Publication date: Available online 15 March 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Ward Whitt, Xiaopei ZhangAbstractThis is a sequel to Whitt and Zhang (2017), in which we developed an aggregate stochastic model of an emergency department (ED) based on the publicly available data from the large 1000-bed Rambam Hospital in Haifa, Israel, from 2004-7, associated with the patient flow analysis by Armony et al. (2015). Here we focus on forecasting future daily arrival totals and predicting hourly occupancy levels in real time, given recent history (previous arrival and departure times of all patients) and u...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - March 17, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research