TITLE: Pushing the Envelope of Operations Research: Applying Management Science to Optimize Health Care Decisions

SPEAKER: Mark S. Roberts, MD MPP

Professor and Chair, Department of Health Policy and Management

Professor of Medicine, Industrial Engineering and Clinical and Translational Science

University of Pittsburgh Schools of Public Health, Medicine and Engineering

ABSTRACT:

Historically, the application of operations research in health care has focused on the process and delivery of care.  Viewing health care delivery as a production process, operations research and industrial engineering techniques have been use to optimize operating room and ambulance schedules, eliminate bottlenecks in emergency rooms, and re-organize the delivery of radiological services.  There have been some applications in optimizing clinical care; most notable perhaps in the development of algorithms to optimize the delivery of radiation therapy, but these remain rare.

Over the past 15 years, we have been applying methods from operations research to optimize the treatment of disease. The preferred methodology in medicine for acquiring this type of knowledge is the randomized controlled trial.  However, randomized trials are designed to answer simple questions such as “Is A better than B?” when, in fact, most clinical and policy questions are much more complex, and involve picking the best treatment out of a wide array of possibilities, or understanding under what conditions is A better than B. Operations research methods are designed to inform these types of optimization questions, but have been rare in the medical literature.  This talk will describe our efforts to advance and apply operations research techniques to clinical patient care decision and policies, using examples from liver transplantation and HIV care.

Host: Dr. Barbara Boyan, Biomedical Engineering