Operations (management) warp speed: Rapid deployment of hospital‐focused predictive/prescriptive analytics for the COVID‐19 pandemic

Pengyi Shi, Jonathan E. Helm, Christopher Chen, Jeff Lim, Rodney P. Parker, Troy Tinsley and Jacob Cecil

Production and Operations Management, 2023, vol. 32, issue 5, 1433-1452

Abstract: At the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic, hospitals were in dire need of data‐driven analytics to provide support for critical, expensive, and complex decisions. Yet, the majority of analytics being developed were targeted at state‐ and national‐level policy decisions, with little availability of actionable information to support tactical and operational decision‐making and execution at the hospital level. To fill this gap, we developed a multi‐method framework leveraging a parsimonious design philosophy that allows for rapid deployment of high‐impact predictive and prescriptive analytics in a time‐sensitive, dynamic, data‐limited environment, such as a novel pandemic. The product of this research is a workload prediction and decision support tool to provide mission‐critical, actionable information for individual hospitals. Our framework forecasts time‐varying patient workload and demand for critical resources by integrating disease progression models, tailored to data availability during different stages of the pandemic, with a stochastic network model of patient movements among units within individual hospitals. Both components employ adaptive tuning to account for hospital‐dependent, time‐varying parameters that provide consistently accurate predictions by dynamically learning the impact of latent changes in system dynamics. Our decision support system is designed to be portable and easily implementable across hospital data systems for expeditious expansion and deployment. This work was contextually grounded in close collaboration with IU Health, the largest health system in Indiana, which has 18 hospitals serving over one million residents. Our initial prototype was implemented in April 2020 and has supported managerial decisions, from the operational to the strategic, across multiple functionalities at IU Health.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.13648

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:popmgt:v:32:y:2023:i:5:p:1433-1452

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1111/(ISSN)1937-5956

Access Statistics for this article

Production and Operations Management is currently edited by Kalyan Singhal

More articles in Production and Operations Management from Production and Operations Management Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().