Title: Patient Scheduling: Empirical Evidence and Analytical Insights

Abstract: 

Using large scale data of MRI services, we measure service duration and show that a number of covariates, including the shift during which the procedure is performed, case mix of the proceeding patients, congestion, and batching of similar procedures affect service duration. We observe that the magnitude of the effect of various mechanisms on service duration may depend on the server type (teaching or community hospital), and customer type (high priority versus low priority patient). For instance, in general, service duration during the night shift is significantly shorter than the day shift, and the decrease is higher for low-priority patients or in community hospital settings. We also show that the inverted-U-shaped relationship observed between the service duration and workload in the literature depends on the priority level. Surprisingly, while this mechanism holds for high priority patients, it is completely vice-versa for low priority patients. We then provide a discrete-time data-driven model of the problem in a finite horizon setting. We analyze the proposed model and provide an analytical gap between the wait cost of different priority levels under the optimal offline policy and a class of online scheduling polices. We validate the results using real world data.

Lecturer: Hossein Abouee Mehrizi

Date/Time: 09:00 – 10:00AM, 9 Dec, 2020

Online Platform: ZOOM Meeting：763 086 2328

Brief introduction of the lecturer: 

Hossein Abouee Mehrizi is an associate professor in the Department of Management Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He is currently the Associate Editor of NRL and HCMS journals. His research direction is empirical analysis of service systems (including health service systems), data-driven modeling of complex stochastic systems, stochastic processes, and statistical learning. He has published more than 20 papers in internationally renowned journals such as OR, POM, NRL, EJOR, MSOM, and DS. He was invited to give special reports at more than 30 conferences including the INFORMS annual meeting, and served as a reviewer for 15 well-known journals including OR, MS, MSOM, POM, NRL, and EJOR.