Operations Research for Health Care Operations Research for Health Care RSS feedThis 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.

Needy boarding patients in emergency departments: An exploratory case study using discrete-event simulation
This article firstly explores the limited previous research on boarding patients. Secondly, this paper quantitatively demonstrates that needy boarding patients can significantly impact system performance and hence should be accounted for in the analysis and planning of an emergency department through discrete-event simulation. Next, three static priority policies (first-come, first-served and always prioritizing either boarding patients or the other patients) and one dynamic priority policy (using accumulating priorities) are evaluated on various performance measures. We find, for our case study, that system performance is...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - March 1, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Editorial Board
Publication date: March 2019Source: Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 20Author(s): (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - March 1, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A role for MCDA to navigate the trade-offs in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s public health recommendations
Publication date: Available online 19 February 2019Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Brian Reddy, Stephen J. Walters, Alejandra Duenas, Praveen Thokala, Michael P. KellyAbstractRecommendations made by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) consider a range of relevant factors. Most famously, this includes interventions’ incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICER). Given the ICER’s primacy in such decision-making, it is sometimes assumed as almost analogous to an optimisation problem, maximising the number of Quality Adjusted Life Years generated by the health system sub...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - February 19, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A variability reduction method for the operating room scheduling problem under uncertainty using CVaR
The objective of the SMILP model is to minimize the CVaR of overtime and idle time costs. Numerical experiments are conducted on real-life benchmark instances, and showed that CVaR outperformed the widely used expected value (EV) approach in reducing variance of the total cost. As compared to the EV in terms of the total cost, the CVaR reduced the variance by 37%, produced a 25% lower interquartile range, and 24% lower median absolute deviation at a slight increase (4%) in the expected value. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - January 8, 2019 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Optimizing the master surgery schedule in a private hospital
Publication date: Available online 1 December 2018Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Inês Marques, M. Eugénia Captivo, Nara BarrosAbstractThis paper proposes a new mixed-integer linear programming model to build cyclic master surgery schedules (MSSs) for a case study of a medium-sized Portuguese private hospital. The problem integrates tactical and strategical decisions of operating room (OR) planning and scheduling. OR time blocks are assigned to surgical services and to individual surgeons. A target OR time per surgical specialty is not given as it is often the case of other studies in the literature...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - December 2, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Physician rostering for workload balance
Publication date: Available online 16 November 2018Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Thomas Adams, Michael O’Sullivan, Cameron WalkerAbstractContinuity of care for patients, that is ensuring patients are treated by a single physician, is one of the most important concerns for hospital management in regards to general medicine (inpatient) departments. Discontinuous care occurs when the number of patients various physicians are caring for becomes imbalanced and patients are transferred between physicians to correct this. This issue can be addressed by constructing rosters for the physicians which aim to...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 17, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Editorial Board
Publication date: December 2018Source: Operations Research for Health Care, Volume 19Author(s): (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - November 15, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A mental workload based patient scheduling model for a Cancer Clinic
This study focused on increasing productivity and efficiency in a Cancer Clinic (CC) taking into consideration mental workload. The demand of the clinic has increased and the clinic recognized the importance of improving the distribution of the resources. Addressing these objectives have a positive impact in operations, however, it also requires managing the human elements of the system in an efficient way. Previous studies have considered human resources as a number representing a fix quantity of available entities without considering their mental capabilities. This research measured mental workload using a perceptual too...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 30, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

An efficient algorithm to enumerate sets with fallbacks in a kidney paired donation program
Publication date: Available online 22 October 2018Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Wen Wang, Mathieu Bray, Peter X.K. Song, John D. KalbfleischAbstractKidney paired donation is a partial solution to overcoming biological incompatibility preventing kidney transplants. A kidney paired donation (KPD) program consists of altruistic or non-directed donors (NDDs) and pairs, each of which comprises a candidate in need of a kidney transplant and her/his willing but incompatible donor. Potential transplants from NDDs or donors in pairs to compatible candidates in other pairs are determined by computer assessmen...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 23, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Inpatient admission management using multiple criteria decision-making methods
Publication date: Available online 15 October 2018Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): M. Chalgham, I. Khatrouch, M. Masmoudi, O. Chakroun Walha, A. DammakAbstractEmergency Department (ED) overcrowding is a public health issue associated with harmful effects simultaneously on patients and ED staff. Despite increased policies and efforts to manage this issue, it continues to rise in many EDs all over the world. ED overcrowding is not caused only by the high number of incoming patients and resources shortage, the most affecting factor leading to such problem is the inpatient boarding. In fact, the patient ha...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 16, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A robust stochastic decision-making model for inventory allocation of surgical supplies to reduce logistics costs in hospitals: A case study
Publication date: Available online 26 September 2018Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Ehsan Ahmadi, Dale T. Masel, Seth HostetlerAbstractIn a hospital, surgical supplies can be stored in multiple locations, each of which has limited space and different associated costs. The locations include central storage, where items are retrieved to build a cart of supplies for each procedure; sterile storage adjacent to the operating rooms; and within the operating rooms themselves. In practice, the decision on allocating items to these locations is often based on the staff’s experience, rather than through optim...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - October 4, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Creating resident shift schedules under multiple objectives by generating and evaluating the Pareto frontier
We present an integer programming-based approach embedded within a recursive algorithm to generate these schedules. We then present both computational results to assess the tractability of our approach and a case study, based on a real-world scheduling problem at the University of Michigan Pediatric Emergency Department, to study how a Chief Resident would evaluate the Pareto set. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - September 10, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Multi-criteria decision analysis for the assessment of non-clinical hospital services: Methodology and case study
Publication date: Available online 9 September 2018Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Irene Lasorsa, Elio Padoano, Sara Marceglia, Agostino AccardoAbstractNon-clinical hospital services to support clinical activities, such as the sterilization service and clinical engineering, are an important technology asset in healthcare, and require constant improvement aimed to reduce economic burden and increase quality. The selection of the most effective healthcare service to adopt in a healthcare facility is a multi-criteria decision problem that classical Health Technology Assessment, being mostly focused on me...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - September 10, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

A structured literature review of simulation modelling applied to Emergency Departments: Current patterns and emerging trends
We present a selection of case studies to illustrate both our classification and findings, and suggest directions for further research. (Source: Operations Research for Health Care)
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 10, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research

Modeling and analysis of short-term work planning in inpatient care settings
Publication date: Available online 3 February 2018Source: Operations Research for Health CareAuthor(s): Lucy G. Aragon, Laila Cure, Ewing Tiong, Rita BushAbstractThis paper uses operations research (OR) to investigate inpatient care work planning decisions from the perspective of a single healthcare provider in a hospital unit. While there has been considerable research on the modeling and analysis of healthcare delivery systems to support medium- to long-term decisions (e.g., daily operating room scheduling, weekly nurse scheduling), there is little research focusing on decisions made at the operational level by front-lin...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - July 10, 2018 Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research