Application of Operations Research to Healthcare

Jia Guo

A chapter in New Research in Nursing - Education and Practice from IntechOpen

Abstract: Operations research (OR) is significantly important to healthcare. OR techniques can make efficient use of medical resources to enhance patients, providers and agencies' satisfaction. Given limited medical resources and high demand from patients, the primary goal of OR is to use optimization models to quantify the problem and apply mathematical algorithms to obtain a close-to-optimal solution. For example, OR has been widely used to scheduling problems by minimizing the number of nurses or maximizing demand coverage, while keeping service regulations satisfied. In this chapter, we first give a brief introduction of optimization models, followed by the application of OR to healthcare problems such as nurse scheduling, home healthcare delivery and transportation services for patients.

Keywords: operations research; mixed integer linear programming; mathematical models; healthcare optimization; nurse scheduling; home healthcare delivery; transportation service (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:291376

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.109919

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