Title: Dynamic Capacity Management for Deferred Surgeries
Speaker: Dr. Kartikey Sharma
Venue: Seminar hall, second floor, IEOR Building
Day, Date, Time: Tuesday, 17th September 2024, 3PM-4PM
Abstract: Healthcare needs are becoming increasingly uncertain, challenging the efficient allocation of provider resources and resulting in extended waiting times for diagnosis and treatments. These delays negatively affect patients' health, increase the related treatment costs, and also decrease the provider's revenue due to departures. Current capacity management policies are rather ad-hoc and either defer excess surgeries or expand capacities by a pre-determined factor. We studied 4 years of medical insurance claims of more than 15,000 hernia patients in the United States and observed the presence of uncertainty in surgery demand and patient departure. However, the endogeneity of the uncertainty to hospital operations renders existing capacity management approaches inapplicable. To this end, we develop an optimization framework, where uncertain parameters and their endogenous nature are modeled via multilinear functions. This nonlinear structure is addressed by two approaches based on robust and distributionally robust optimization. For the robust approach, we introduce the tree of uncertainty products that provides tractable approximations under various decision rules. These methods offer sizable improvements over alternative methods for hernia patients.
Brief Bio: Kartikey Sharma completed his PhD in Industrial Engineering at Northwestern University in 2020 under Dr. Omid Nohadani on Robust Optimization. Since then he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Zuse Institute Berlin. His research interests are optimization under uncertainty and interpretability in machine learning and optimization. He has applied his work to the domains of Transportation and Healthcare.