A Reservation Policy for Medical Diagnostic Resource Allocation

Event Date: 29 July 2019

Speaker: Weifen Zhuang, Xiamen University, China

Time: 3pm

Location: Strathclyde Business School, Room SW106

Abstract:

Medical diagnostic facilities such as CT or MRI, which form the critical part of a comprehensive health care system, play an important role in the proper diagnosis and timely treatment of diseases. In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem of medical diagnostic facilities by first formulating and solving the problem through a stochastic dynamic programming (DP) approach, which leads to an optimal policy characterized by a switching curve. We then derive upper- and lower-bounds to the DP problem, and show the solutions to both bounds are asymptotically optimal when a scaling constant $T$ is large; in particular, the gap between the bounds is shown to be in the order of $\sqrt{T}$. Based on the bounds, we propose a nested-partition policy, and show analytically that it outperforms the lower-bound policy. Data and process flows from one of the largest hospitals in China are used in numerical studies, along with simulation, for a weekly application of the nested-partition policy on a rolling-horizon manner; and the results show a significant improvement in several key performance measures upon the hospital's current practice.

This is joint work with David D. Yao from Columbia University and Li Luo from Sichuan University.

Biography

Weifen Zhuang, is a full professor in Management Science at Xiamen University (XMU) and the director of Research Center for Operations Management. She obtained her Ph.D. in Operations Management from Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Prior to joining XMU in 2011, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Dr. Zhuang’s research focuses on Healthcare Operations Management, Revenue Management and Pricing. She had published research papers in academic journals such as Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Operational Research Society, Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, Maritime Policy & Management, Operations Research Letters. She is a frequent reviewer for the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grant and other grant agencies. She has taught undergraduate, ME and PhD in Operations Management, and received several teaching awards. The Case “Xiamen Airlines: Embracing for Impact” she wrote had been registered at Ivy Publishing and Harvard Business Review. The project "Intelligent Collaboration Platform of Regional Clinical Pathway" she collaborated with Zhongshan Hospital Affiliated to XMU had won the Second Prize for Progress in Science and Technology of Xiamen.

Published: 17 July 2019