TITLE: Optimizing Healthcare and Using Healthcare to Motivate Optimization Methods

ABSTRACT:

Healthcare, particularly in US, is a large and complex system.  Policies are determined based on legislated priorities, and decisions are often made based on suboptimal algorithms.   There is a growing interest in optimal resource utilization, while preserving the ethical equipoise between equity, justice and utility in healthcare.  Solutions require a trans-disciplinary collaborative approach, where industrial and systems engineers, operations researchers, and management scientists can make significant contributions by developing realistic data-driven and model based approaches to promote evidence based decision making and informing policy changes.  The need to bring greater realism to the decision models also motivates new methodological developments that can then benefit application in areas other than health.  The central consideration in developing innovative strategies to improve the health system is to save patients’ lives and to improve their quality of life. This must be balanced against risks and cost to individuals and society.   This leads to problems with multiple objectives, and input from multiple experts weighing in on these objectives. The parameters of the functions modeling the objectives and constraints are uncertain as model recommendations have implications on an unknown future. 

In this presentation we will focus on a few specific examples from our research illustrating how work in healthcare has provided insights towards developing concepts of robust Pareto optimality in multi-objective decision making; generation of parametric inequalities to significantly reduce the complexity of two-stage stochastic programs; and the need to consider out-of-sample error minimization towards developing a distributionally robust support vector machine.

Brief Biography:
Sanjay Mehrotra is the director of Center for Engineering at Health at Northwestern University.  He received his PhD in Operations Research from Columbia University.  Mehrotra is widely known for his methodology research in optimization that has spanned from linear, convex, mixed integer, stochastic, multi-objective, distributionally robust, and risk adjusted optimization.  His healthcare research includes topics in predictive modeling, budgeting, hospital operations, and policy modeling using modern operations research tools.  He is the immediate past chair of the INFORMS Optimization Society.  He has also been a INFORMS vice-president of (Chapter/Fora) and the chair of the INFORMS subdivision council.  He is the current Health Department editor of Institute for Industrial Engineering journal IIE-Transactions, and also held the role of Optimization Department editor for the same journal.

.