Information Technology and Routing Policies in Open-shop Healthcare Systems

    Project: Research

    Project Details

    Description

    This proposal, motivated by a collaboration with a leading multidisciplinary hospital in Israel that provides periodic health screening services to corporate customers, focuses on the operations of stochastic open-shop service networks with two objectives: traditional macro-level measures, such as the overall wait, and the untypical micro-level measures, like the probability of long waits at the individual station. The clinic recently implemented two information technological (IT) systems to improve the system performance and customers' perception of the health screening service. The first one is an auto-routing system that mimics the clinic's dispatcher's current practice and can make routing decisions much faster than the dispatcher. The second one is an SMS system that sends out targeted routing messages to customers while causing less disturbance to other waiting customers. The clinic management provides us with operational data before and after implementing these two IT systems to understand these two IT systems' benefits in the clinic. From our preliminary empirical analysis of the clinic's data set, auto-routing and SMS systems' direct impact is somewhat limited. The dispatcher and customer calling process are not bottlenecks of the clinic, so the IT systems that accelerating these two processes may not improve the clinic's performance significantly. However, implementing these two IT systems expands the space of the clinic's feasible routing policies. We propose several routing policies with priority and delayed routing decisions to improve the clinic's operations. We present a detailed research agenda to examine their efficiency through analytical and simulation models. 
    Project number9043237
    Grant typeGRF
    StatusFinished
    Effective start/end date1/09/2114/06/24

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