La utilización de la investigación de operaciones como soporte a la toma de decisiones en el sector salud: Un estado del arte

The contributions of Operations Research (OR) in the healthcare field have been extensively studied in the scientific literature since the 1960s, covering decision support tools with operational, tactical, and strategic approaches. The aim of this article is to analyze the historical development of the application of OR models in healthcare. The application trends for optimization, planning, and decision- making models are studied through a descriptive literature review and a bibliometric analysis of scientific papers published between 1952 and 2016. An upward trend in the usage of operational models is observed with the predominance of resource optimization approaches and strategic decision-making for public health.Los aportes de la Investigación de Operaciones (IO) en el campo de la salud han sido ampliamente estudiados en la literatura científica desde la década de 1960, abarcando herramientas para el soporte a la decisión en enfoques operacionales, tácticos y estratégicos. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el avance y el desarrollo histórico del uso de modelos operativos en el campo de la salud. A través de una revisión bibliográfica descriptiva y un análisis bibliométrico de artículos científicos publicados durante el periodo 1952-2016, se estudia el comportamiento de las tendencias en la aplicación de modelos operativos para la optimización, la planificación y la toma de decisiones en el sector salud. Se evidencia una tendencia creciente en el uso de modelos de IO durante el periodo estudiado, predominando las aplicaciones orientadas a la optimización de recursos y decisiones estratégicas de salud pública

Operations research as a decision-making tool in the health sector: A state of the art

The contributions of Operations Research (OR) in the healthcare field have been extensively studied in the scientific literature since the 1960s, covering decision support tools with operational, tactical, and strategic approaches. The aim of this article is to analyze the historical development of the application of OR models in healthcare. The application trends for optimization, planning, and decision- making models are studied through a descriptive literature review and a bibliometric analysis of scientific papers published between 1952 and 2016. An upward trend in the usage of operational models is observed with the predominance of resource optimization approaches and strategic decision-making for public health.Los aportes de la Investigación de Operaciones (IO) en el campo de la salud han sido ampliamente estudiados en la literatura científica desde la década de los 60, abarcando el soporte a la decisión en enfoques operacionales, tácticos y estratégicos. Se presenta un resumen del desarrollo histórico de la IO en el campo de la salud y se listan los principales modelos aplicados en los últimos años, identificando el principal enfoque utilizado, y el potencial aporte a la toma de decisiones en el campo de la salud

Opportunities and Challenges in Healthcare Information Systems Research: Caring for Patients with Chronic Conditions

To prepare for the 2030 “baby-boomer challenge”, some governments have begun to implement healthcare reforms over the past two decades. These reforms have led healthcare information systems (HIS) to evolve into a major research area in our discipline. This research area has an increasing individual, organizational, and economic impact. Due to the 2030 “baby-boomer challenge”, the number of elderly individuals continues to increase, and they may have chronic illnesses, such as eye problems and Alzheimer’s disease. Given the practical need for HIS that support chronic care, we decided to conduct a literature synthesis and identify opportunities for HIS research. Specifically, we present the chronic care model and analyze how IS researchers have discussed HIS to address the needs of patients with chronic illness. Further, we identify research gaps and discuss the research topics on HIS that future work can extend and customize to support these patients. Our results stimulate and guide future research in the HIS area. This paper has the potential to strengthen the body of knowledge on HIS

Towards a centralised appointments system to optimise the length of patient stay

Over the last few decades, rational health care management and, in particular, operating theater planning, has attracted increased attention from practitioners and from the scientific community. However, although the operating theater environment is clearly stochastic, the impact of this randomness has often been ignored. In practice, simple rules based largely on past experience (such as keeping a safety margin), are most frequently used when making plans for the operating theater. In this paper, we propose an approach to help rationalize, at a strategic decision-making level, the way in which stochasticity can be taken into account in operating theater management, to help in the sizing and in the allocation of capacity. The three main sources of randomness are considered: durations of operations, unexpected emergencies and blocking because of a full recovery unit. Based on the Markov theory, our tool enables several performance measures to be estimated. An operating theater manager can use our approach to make informed decisions and assess, for example, the disruption of the planning by emergencies, the waiting times for emergency patients, the impact of the recovery unit, or the distribution of the working time. In particular, our approach helps determine the number of operations that should be planned in order to keep expected overtime limited. The tool is described in detail, discussed, and applied to the illustrative case of a Belgian hospital