About COMiHC
Centre of Operations Management within Health Care (COMiHC) is an open organisation that focuses on quantitative decision support for planning and management within heath care. The site will be a meeting place where you
- jointly identify areas with large improvement potential;
- jointly initiate research projects;
- jointly work on software prototypes, reports, articles, education;
- transfer of knowledge, experience, and results between members;
Our vision is that COMiHC will be financially independent, virtual resource centre for health organisation in Norway and Scandinavia. Also, the knowledge derived from the organisation should be generic and public. Part of our strategy is to apply methods and quantitative decision support from Operational Management to health care sector. We believe that this along with transfer of data, information, knowledge, and experience between members would lead to better resource management and management control; this in turn improve the quality of health. We hope to show that more efficient resource management and control will lead to higher efficiency and to less cost
Please feel free to join!
BeAct
Thursday, 27 August 2009 12:19 | Written by Erik Lien Johnsen |
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The aim of the project BeAct is to automate shift design/scheduling for hospitals. Shift design/scheduling is the process of making a schedule containing shifts that cover the demand for workers while satisfying a set of other requirements. The requirements are many, and the number of possible solutions too vast for a manual approach-finding a solution manually is possible, but it is unlikely to be an optimal solution. Part of the challenge we have tackled is to formalize the set of requirements in a mathematical model-it is critical for the optimization to include all of the actual requirements, and not only simplified versions or just those that are easy to formulate. In BeAct, we have used a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) approach. Through a continuous dialog with several Norwegian hospitals we have built the model with variables, constraints, and objectives. Some of the objectives included are: minimization of personnel cost; minimization of the total number of different shifts; matching with the contracted working hours; even distribution of excess capacity. Constraints included are: a maximum of different shifts to be used during different periods; overlap between shifts; a common leaving time for all day shifts; one main shift with most of the workers each day. Read more...
Last Updated (Friday, 28 August 2009 07:03) The State of the Art of Nurse Rostering
Friday, 29 May 2009 10:53 | Written by Edmund K. Burke, Patrick De Causmaecker, Greet Vanden Berghe, and Hendrik Van Landeghem |
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Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. The need for quality software solutions is acute for a number of reasons. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preferences. A high quality roster can lead to a more contented and thus more effective workforce.
In this review, we discuss nurse rostering within the global personnel scheduling problem in healthcare. We begin by briefly discussing the review and overview papers that have appeared in the literature and by noting the role that nurse rostering plays within the wider context of longer term hospital personnel planning. The main body of the paper describes and critically evaluates solution approaches which span the interdisciplinary spectrum from operations research techniques to artificial intelligence methods. We conclude by drawing on the strengths and weaknesses of the literature to outline the key issues that need addressing in future nurse rostering research.
Journal of Scheduling, (Download). Last Updated (Wednesday, 07 October 2009 10:21) |
The HOSPITAL project
Thursday, 23 April 2009 09:37 | Written by Martin Stølevik |
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HOSPITAL (Health care Optimisation Software for PlannIng, rosTering, And scheduLing) is a five year research project mainly funded by The Research Council of Norway. The industrial partners Gatsoft AS and DIPS ASA are co-funding the project. The main objective in the project is to further develop and disseminate world leading competence in high-performance, robust and adaptable optimization methods for decision support in health care planning software. The competence is needed to meet strategic goals of higher efficiency and service levels in the health sector, and to facilitate innovation in the tool vendor industry. We shall focus on two specific, highly challenging, important planning tasks: personnel rostering and surgery scheduling. Optimization methods will be incrementally developed and assessed via prototypes. A generic optimization library and implementation guide will ensure wide dissemination and exploitation of the methodology, also outside of the health sector. Last Updated (Thursday, 04 June 2009 11:21) A three-phase approach for operating theatre schedules
Friday, 29 May 2009 09:34 | Written by Angela Testi and Elena Tanfani and Giancarlo Torre |
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In this paper we develop a three-phase, hierarchical approach for the weekly scheduling of operating rooms. This approach has been implemented in one of the surgical departments of a public hospital located in Genova (Genoa), Italy. Our aim is to suggest an integrated way of facing surgical activity planning in order to improve overall operating theatre efficiency in terms of overtime and throughput as well as waiting list reduction, while improving department organization. In the first phase we solve a bin packing-like problem in order to select the number of sessions to be weekly scheduled for each ward; the proposed and original selection criterion is based upon an updated priority score taking into proper account both the waiting list of each ward and the reduction of residual ward demand. Then we use a blocked booking method for determining optimal time tables, denoted Master Surgical Schedule (MSS), by defining the assignment between wards and surgery rooms. Lastly, once the MSS has been determined we use the simulation software environment Witness 2004 in order to analyze different sequencings of surgical activities that arise when priority is given on the basis of a) the longest waiting time (LWT), b) the longest processing time (LPT) and c) the shortest processing time (SPT). The resulting simulation models also allow us to outline possible organizational improvements in surgical activity. The results of an extensive computational experimentation pertaining to the studied surgical department are here given and analyzed. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007. Article provided by Springer in its journal Health Care Management Science (Download) Last Updated (Friday, 29 May 2009 09:48) |
