Health Care Systems Engineering

Authors: Jingshan Li Andrea Matta Evren Sahin

Publish Date: 2015/12/12

Volume: 28, Issue: 1-2, Pages: 1-4

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Abstract

Cost containment in health care services is becoming more and more important in a context in which the demand for health care services is increasing because of the population ageing from 4  in 2010 to nearly 10  in 2050 in OECD countries the increase in chronic pathologies and the social changes over recent decades The way in which health care service organizations are managed affects their global system performance and needs to be redesigned in order to address the requirements of the new environmentThe primary objective of this Special Issue is to publish papers that reflect recent developments to improve the service delivery in health care systems Scientists and practitioners presented their current research topics at the International Conference on Health Care Systems Engineering HCSE 2013 held in Milano Italy at San Raffaele Hospital in the areas of health care systems modeling simulation and optimization All of the contributions selected in this Special Issue propose novel methods models and analyses illustrated by real world examplesFor this Special Issue fourteen papers have been selected for publication after a thorough peerreview according to the standards of the FSM journal Six of these papers have been previously presented at HCSE 2013 and significantly extended for this Special Issue The other eight papers come from different channelsThe first paper by Helber Böhme Oucherif Lagershausen and Kasper presents a hierarchical layout planning approach that determines the locations of departments and wards of a hospital in order to reduce the interdepartment transportation costs They apply their approach to a fictitious system of connected hospital buildings where they determine the allocation of the organizational units to minimize the consumption of resources used in transportation processesHulshof Mes Boucherie and Hans develop a stochastic approach for a tactical healthcare planning problem ie elective patient admission planning and allocation of hospital resource capacities by modelling it as a Approximate Dynamic Programming problem ADP for large reallife sized instances encountered in Dutch hospitals Their solution approach combines various techniques within the ADPframework and the field of mathematical programming The performance of this approach is assessed by comparing it to two “greedy” planning approaches Results obtained indicate that the algorithm performs better than the greedy approaches in reasonable run timesThe paper by Mallor Azcárate and Barado deals with bedmanagement policies that aim at minimizing patient rejections or minimizing the length of stay shortening by modifying the service time rates of servers The authors propose either analytical or numerical solutions obtained via simulation–optimization depending on the specific formulation The approach is general enough to be applied to the majority of wards or hospitalsThe paper by Zhong Song Li Ertl and Fiedler introduces a Markov chain model for design and analysis of a new Gastroenterology GI clinic at Digestive Health Centre of University of Wisconsin Health The model is extended to nonMarkovian scenario and validated through observed data Using the model various design options under different system variations are investigated which provide recommendations for the new GI clinicThe next paper by Kuo Rado Lupia Leung and Graham presents a simulation case study to analyze patient flow in a hospital emergency department By integrating with metaheuristics a simulation–optimization approach is used to obtain a good set of estimate of input parameters even with incomplete data Then the impact of possible changes are evaluated to provide decision support for operations managers

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