Optimization Models for Capacity Planning in Health Care Delivery

Download or read book Optimization Models for Capacity Planning in Health Care Delivery written by Chin-I. Lin and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT: Health care capacity planning is the art and science of predicting the quantity of resources required to deliver health care service at specified levels of cost and quality. Because of variability in the arrival of patients and in the delivery of health care services, successfully meeting the demand for health care services is a daunting task that requires an understanding of the inherent trade-o® between its cost and quality of service. In our work, we model the general health care systems as queueing stations and incorporate queueing theory into an optimization framework. The queueing modeling approach captures the stochastic nature of arrivals and service times that is typical in health care systems. The optimization framework determines the minimum cost capacity required to achieve a target level of customer service. The inclusions of queueing equations and discrete capacity options result the capacity planning models in non-linear integer programming formulations. We develop e®ective solution algorithms to obtain high quality solutions particularly for realistic-sized problems. For the analysis of underlying queuing systems, we either use available results from the literature or develop approximations. For the solution of optimization models, we employ network optimization, meta-heuristic, and Lagrangian relaxation approaches to develop e®ective solution algorithms. We present results from extensive computational experiments to demonstrate the computational e"ciency and e®ectiveness of the proposed solution approaches.