Operations Research
Hajar Shirneshan; Ahmad Sadegheih; Hasan Hosseini-Nasab; Mohammd Mehdi Lotfi
Abstract
Due to the importance of the health field, the problem of determining the shift scheduling of care providers has been addressed in many studies, and various methods have been proposed to solve it. Considering different skills and contracts for care providers is one of the essential issues in this field. ...
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Due to the importance of the health field, the problem of determining the shift scheduling of care providers has been addressed in many studies, and various methods have been proposed to solve it. Considering different skills and contracts for care providers is one of the essential issues in this field. Given the uncertainty in patients' demands, it is a crucial issue as to how to assign care providers to different shifts. One area facing this uncertainty is the provision of services to cancer patients. This study develops a stochastic programming model to account for patient demand uncertainty by considering different skills and contracts for care providers. In the first step, care providers are assigned to work shifts, then, in the second step, the required overtime hours are determined. The sample average approximation method is presented to determine an optimal schedule by minimizing care providers' regular and overtime costs with different contracts and skills. Then, the appropriate sample size is 100, determined based on the Monte Carlo and Latin Hypercube methods. In the following, the lower and upper bounds of the optimal solution are calculated. As the numerical results of the study show, the convergence of the lower and upper bounds of the optimal solution is obtained from the Latin Hypercube method. The best solution is equal to 189247.3 dollars and is achieved with a difference of 0.143% between the upper bound and lower bounds of the optimal solution. The Monte Carlo simulation method is used to validate the care provider program in the next stage. As shown, in the worst case, the value of the objective function is equal to 197480 dollars.
Systems and service modeling and simulation
Javid Jouzdani; Hadi Shirouyehzad
Abstract
In recent decades, several outbreaks have threatened societies and claimed many lives. Outbreak response management plays a crucial role in reducing the fatality rate and the total healthcare system cost. Among all the parameters affecting the performance of the outbreak response system, the available ...
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In recent decades, several outbreaks have threatened societies and claimed many lives. Outbreak response management plays a crucial role in reducing the fatality rate and the total healthcare system cost. Among all the parameters affecting the performance of the outbreak response system, the available resources are one of the most important. This becomes critical when the number of infected people who need such resources is substantial. In such circumstances, the system cost and the death rate may significantly rise. Therefore, in this paper, we present an analysis of the impact of the contact frequency among people during an outbreak considering the capacity of the healthcare system expressed as the total number of hospital beds following a systems dynamics approach. We investigate the case of the novel Coronavirus, known as COVID-19, in Iran for which the results indicate the circumstances under which the healthcare system may become exhausted, and a catastrophe may occur. Finally, some suggestions are made based on the analysis of the results to avoid such circumstances.
