AN INVESTMENT ANALYSIS OF VOCATIONAL PROGRAMS OFFERED IN MISSOURI JUNIOR COLLEGES

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Agnew Hall History Narrative

A history of Agnew Hall, including its construction and an estimated timeline of construction activities. Donald Richardson, the one who wrote this piece, describes his time coming to work on Agnew Hall, as well as remembering some of those he worked with in its construction.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/buildings/1044/thumbnail.jp

Improved Airborne System for Sensing Wildfires

The Wildfire Airborne Sensing Program (WASP) is engaged in a continuing effort to develop an improved airborne instrumentation system for sensing wildfires. The system could also be used for other aerial-imaging applications, including mapping and military surveillance. Unlike prior airborne fire-detection instrumentation systems, the WASP system would not be based on custom-made multispectral line scanners and associated custom- made complex optomechanical servomechanisms, sensors, readout circuitry, and packaging. Instead, the WASP system would be based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment that would include (1) three or four electronic cameras (one for each of three or four wavelength bands) instead of a multispectral line scanner; (2) all associated drive and readout electronics; (3) a camera-pointing gimbal; (4) an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver for measuring the position, velocity, and orientation of the aircraft; and (5) a data-acquisition subsystem. It would be necessary to custom-develop an integrated sensor optical-bench assembly, a sensor-management subsystem, and software. The use of mostly COTS equipment is intended to reduce development time and cost, relative to those of prior systems

Operations Research Frameworks for Improving Make-Ahead Drug Policies at Outpatient Chemotherapy Infusion Centers

Outpatient chemotherapy infusion is one of the most common forms of treatment used to cure, control, and ease symptoms of cancer. Patients who require outpatient chemotherapy infusion undergo lengthy and physically demanding infusion sessions over the course of their treatment. While the frequency and duration of visits vary by patient, drug, and cancer type, most patients will require several treatments over the course of months or years to complete their regimen/treat their disease. Receiving infusion is just one part of the complex treatment process. Patients may have their blood work done, wait for the results to process, visit their oncologist, wait on their order to be placed by their oncologist and prepared by the pharmacy, and then have the infusion administered by infusion clinic staff. Each step introduces randomness which can lead to propagated delays. These delays negatively affect patients as well as clinical operation cost and staff workload. We focus on optimizing drug preparation at the pharmacy to reduce patient delays. Drugs can be prepared the morning before patients arrive to prevent the patient from waiting the additional time needed to prepare their prescribed drugs in addition to any other wait time incurred during peak pharmacy hours. However, patients scheduled for outpatient chemotherapy infusion sometimes may need to cancel at the last minute even after arriving for their appointment (i.e. patient may be deemed too ill to receive treatment). This results in the health system incurring waste cost if the drug was made ahead since the drugs are patient specific and have a short shelf life. Infusion centers must implement policies to balance this potential waste cost with the time savings for their patients and staff. In support of this effort, this dissertation focuses on methods and strategies to improve the process flow of chemotherapy infusion outpatients by optimizing pharmacy make-ahead policies. We propose using three different methods which build upon each other. First we develop a predictive model which utilizes patient-specific data to estimate the probability that a patient will defer or not show for treatment on a given day. Generally, the ability to generate high-quality predictions of patient deferrals can be highly valuable in managing clinical operations, such as scheduling patients, determining which drugs to make before patients arrive, and establishing the proper staffing for a given day. We also introduce how the patient-specific probability of deferral can help determine a ``general rule of thumb" policy for what should be made ahead on a given day. Next we utilize these probabilities in two integer programming models. These multi-criteria optimization models prioritize which and how many drugs to make ahead given a fixed window of time. This is done with the dual objectives of reducing the expected waste cost as well as the expected value of reduced patient waiting time. Lastly, we utilize simulation to better quantify the impact of our proposed policies. We show that making chemotherapy drugs ahead of an infusion appointment not only benefit the patient they are prescribed for but also subsequent patients due to the decrease load (i.e., reduced blocking) on the pharmacy system as a whole. Each method utilizes electronic medical record data from the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center (UMRCC) but may be generalized to any cancer center infusion clinic.PHDIndustrial & Operations EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151706/1/donalric_1.pdfDescription of donalric_1.pdf : Restricted to UM users only