Description
Today's health care industry is multidisciplinary with many players and levels each with its own set of complex behaviours. Better planning and management of these complexities can help improve the efficacy of health care. Examples of such management include (but are not limited to) managing big health care facilities, improving efficiency of emergency services, better decision making in complicated treatments, preventing and managing epidemics, etc. Analytical and quantitative methods developed in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research for other complex systems like manufacturing systems, supply chains, infrastructure and service systems are becoming useful for today's health care systems as well. This course will serve two purposes: (1) introduce the students to planning and management problems arising in health care, and (2) train them in developing and applying techniques of IEOR for solving these problems.
Contents
The course will focus on applications of optimization, simulation, queueing theory, decision analysis and other IEOR techniques in the following (and related) topics.
- Scheduling appointments of patients with primary health care providers and specialists
- Resource planning for equipment, rooms and staff
- Capacity planning and inventory management in health care supply chains
- Planning and managing emergency services
- Designing and operating organ exchanges
- Modeling spread of epidemics and planning response
- Mathematical modeling of biological systems
- Design of optimal radiotherapy and other treatments
- Financial planning and pricing in health care
- Economics of community health care
- Designing experiments and statistical analysis of clinical data
- Managing health care during calamities
References
Reference material for this this course is based on surveys, book-chapters, case-studies and research articles in various journals related to health care and Operations Research. Some examples are as follows.
- Handbook of Healthcare Operations Management: Methods and Applications, Brian T. Denton, ed., 2013, Springer New York.
- Operations Research and Health Care: A Handbook of Methods and Applications, Margaret L. Brandeau, Francois Sainfort, William P. Pierskalla, eds., 2004, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Massachusetts.
- Ambulance allocation and relocation models (A Review), L. Brotcorne, G. Laporte and F. Semet, European Journal of Operational Research, 147, 2003, pp 451-463.
- Operational Research in management of the operating theatre: A survey, F. Guerriero and R. Guido, Health Care Management Science, 14, 2011, pp 89-114.
- Appointment scheduling in health care: Challenges and opportunities, D. Gupta and B. Denton, IIE Transactions, 40, 2008, pp 800-819.
- Mathematics of infectious diseases, H. W. Hethcote, SIAM Review, 42(4), 2000, pp. 599-633.
- Optimizing the delivery of radiation therapy to cancer patients, D. M. Shepard, M. C. Ferris, G. H. Olivera, T. R. Mackie, SIAM Review, 41(4), 1999, pp. 721-744.
- Research articles in journals: Management Science, Operations Research, Interfaces, Annals of Operations Research, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Networks, The Lancet, SIAM Review, etc, and reports from Census of India, WHO, NSSO, UNICEF, etc.