Healthcare operations management: a holistic care chain perspective

Addressing the entire care chain, this book presents the outcomes of advanced research on healthcare operations management based on real-world data and practices in China. It includes hands-on methods and applications in this interdisciplinary research field, which combines healthcare service, operations management, industrial engineering and information technology.

The content is divided into three parts, reflecting the entire care chain. The first part discusses the pre-hospital service stage and explores resource deployment problems in emergency medical service, such as ambulance allocation. The second part focuses on inpatient care services, including staffing and task allocation among nurses and doctors based on multi-project management under uncertainties. In addition, a highly promising diagnosis approach is proposed and a specific algorithm is derived on the basis of real-world datasets which can improve the diagnosis accuracy remarkably. In turn, the third part considers the post-hospital service stage, which most often takes place at community hospitals, and provides a quantitative evaluation and optimization of scheduling for tasks and team members for home care services.

The book is intended for a broad audience, including students, researchers and practitioners working in various areas of healthcare management, service management, and operations management.