Select, route and schedule: optimizing community paramedicine service delivery with mandatory visits and patient prioritization.

Healthcare delivery in the United States has been characterized as overly reactive and dependent on emergency department care for safety net coverage, with opportunity for improvement around discharge planning and high readmissions and emergency department bounce-back rates. Community paramedicine is a recent healthcare innovation that enables proactive visitation of patients at home, often shortly after emergency department and hospital discharge. We establish the first optimization-based framework to study efficiencies in the management and operation of a community paramedicine program.

Operations research and analytics to combat human trafficking: A systematic review of academic literature.

Human trafficking is a widespread and compound social, economic, and human rights issue occurring in every region of the world. While there have been an increasing number of anti-human trafficking studies from the Operations Research and Analytics domains in recent years, no systematic review of this literature currently exists. We fill this gap by providing a systematic literature review that identifies and classifies the body of Operations Research and Analytics research related to the anti-human trafficking domain, thereby illustrating the collective impact of the field to date.

Key considerations when using health insurance claims data in advanced data analyses: an experience report.

Health claims have become a popular source of data for healthcare analytics, with numerous applications ranging from disease burden estimation and policy evaluation to drug event detection and advanced predictive analytics. Independent of the application, a researcher utilising claims information will likely encounter challenges in using the data, which include dealing with several coding systems and coding irregularities. We highlight some of these challenges and approaches for successful analysis that may reduce implementation time and help in avoiding common pitfalls.

A Decision-Support Approach for Provider Scheduling in a Patient-Centered Medical Home.

The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) has been proposed as a viable and medically effective model of primary care delivery. The fundamental principles of a PCMH address increased access and offer new ways to organize a practice. Creating provider schedules able to satisfy the operational and organizational constraints imposed by this type of delivery model is a challenging, complex, and time-consuming task.

The provision of mental health treatment after screening: exploring the relationship between treatment setting and treatment intensity.

Objective: Primary care screening programs for mental health disorders are designed to detect patients who might benefit from treatment. As such, the utility of these programs is predicated on the actions that take place in response to a positive screen. Our objective was to characterize the cascade of care delivery steps following a positive screen for a mental health disorder.

Use of discrete event simulation to improve a mental health clinic.

Objective: To improve clinic design, trial-and-error is commonly used to discover strategies that lead to improvement. Our goal was to predict the effects of various changes before undertaking them.

Method: Systems engineers collaborated with staff at an integrated primary care-mental health care clinic to create a computer simulation that mirrored how the clinic currently operates.

Allocation of aid for health institutions in Ukraine: implications from a case study of Chornobyl (Chernobyl) area hospitals.

Over the past two decades, numerous non-governmental organizations have sought to improve the health status of populations struggling with the lingering effects of the Chornobyl (Chernobyl) nuclear disaster. Political and economic features of Ukraine's government produced a health system unable to provide services required by its population. To compensate somewhat for these shortcomings, Ukraine's health institutions rely on foreign donations.