Part 1

Optimization in Health Services

David is a healthcare administration leader who manages the operations of a long-term care facility. Within the past 6 months, long-term care patients and residents have experienced an increased number of hospital readmissions due to ongoing acute infections. In striving to ensure effective healthcare delivery and patient safety, David is seeking to use optimization as an analytic technique to determine how to best implement workflow processes to have clinical staff and physicians dedicate time to routine history and full-body observation to help prevent ongoing acute infections.

Review the resources for this week, and reflect on how optimization techniques might enhance healthcare delivery. Consider the value of optimization techniques in assisting healthcare administration leaders in providing quality patient care and safety.

Describe of some problems that might lend themselves to optimization in your health services organization or one with which you are familiar, and explain why. Then, set up a fictitious optimization problem that would save one of the problems (e.g., Max z = a1x1 + a2x2, subject to constraints). Be specific, and provide examples.

Part 2

Optimization Using Healthcare Examples

In what other ways might optimization be used to maximize healthcare delivery? What types of processes and workflows are best served by optimization in health services organizations?

Optimization is a vital prescriptive analytic technique that healthcare administrators can use to help address challenges in effective and efficient healthcare delivery. Health decision makers may seek to find optimal solutions for a particular objective given various constraints. For example, optimization is often used for generating nursing staff schedules to ensure appropriate staff coverage with varying patient inflows.

For this Assignment, you will be using optimization techniques to evaluate two separate medical problems, one involving mechanical heart valves and another involving a pharmaceutical company. Review the resources for this week, and examine the different optimization techniques that can be used for this Assignment.

The Assignment: (3–5 pages)

• Complete Problem 36 on page 312 (mechanical heart valves) and Problem 42 on page 713 (pharmaceutical company) of your course text.

Note: You will complete these problems using Excel and Solver.