Healthcare

Nursing care is arguably the single biggest factor in both the cost of hospital care and patient satisfaction. Inadequate inpatient nursing levels have also been cited as a significant factor in medical errors and emergency room overcrowding. Yet, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the current methods of determining nurse staffing levels, including the most common one of using minimum nurse-to-patient ratios. In this paper, we represent the nursing system as a variable finite-source queuing model.

This paper analyzes longitudinal state-level data during the period 1995–2004 to investigate whether use of newer prescription drugs has reduced the ratio of the number of workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance benefits to the working-age population (the “DI recipiency rate”).  

Cancer drugs have become more expensive over the past few years, leading many people to question whether the treatments are really worth their high costs. But despite the sticker shock, cancer medicines have provided good value for money.

The rate of increase of longevity has varied considerably across U.S. states since 1991. This paper examines the effect of the quality of medical care, behavioral risk factors (obesity, smoking, and AIDS incidence), and other variables (education, income, and health insurance coverage) on life expectancy and medical expenditure using longitudinal state-level data. We examine the effects of three different measures of the quality of medical care.

Maximizing throughput for heterogeneous parallel server queues has received quite a bit of attention from the research community and the stability region for such systems is well understood.  However, many real-world systems have periods where they are temporarily overloaded.  Under such scenarios, the unstable queues often starve limited resources.  This work examines what happens during periods of temporary overload.  Specifically, we look at how to fairly distribute stress.  We explore the dynamics of the queue workloads under the MaxWeight scheduling policy duri

What are the respective roles of the public and private sectors in drug development?

This paper investigates the impact of the introduction of new orphan drugs on premature mortality from rare diseases using longitudinal, disease-level data obtained from a number of major databases. The analysis is performed using data from two countries: the U.S. (during the period 1999-2006) and France (during the period 2000-2007).

The problem of determining nurse staffing levels in a hospital environment is a complex task due to variable patient census levels and uncertain service capacity caused by nurse absenteeism. In this paper, we combine an empirical investigation of the factors affecting nurse absenteeism rates with an analytical treatment of nurse staffing decisions using a novel variant of the newsvendor model. Using data from the emergency department of a large urban hospital, we find that absenteeism rates are correlated with anticipated future nurse workload levels.

Many organizations, such as banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, and police departments, routinely use queueing models to help manage and allocate resources in order to respond to demands in a timely and cost-efficient fashion. Though queueing analysis has been used in hospitals and other healthcare settings, its use in this sector is not widespread.