Optimal Planning and Scheduling in Health Care

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The overarching objectives of the proposed research are to advance (ADP) computational methods and theory, and to develop new and implementable methods for capacity planning to meet the needs of frail seniors and persons with mental health and addiction issues. The ADP research will be targeted primarily at the operations research community, but it is also intended to impact patient scheduling practice at the BC Cancer Agency. The capacity planning research will advance queuing methodology, identify new research areas for the OR community and hopefully impact policy and patient care. Specific objectives of the ADP stream of research include obtaining closed form characterizations of the optimal approximate value function; comparison of the quality of solutions to the ADP obtained through constraint sampling, column generation, smoothed LP approximation and simulation based methods; exploring the impact of basis function choice, obtaining new bounds and establishing convergence of simulation based methods in transient systems. Specific objectives of the research on long term care planning include determining the capacity needed to provide the full range of coordinated services needed by frail seniors including home care, assisted living, dementia care and different levels of nursing home care in a timely manner. Methods used include simulation optimization and non-stationary queuing network approximations. Another stream of research will focus on determining the resources required to meet the needs of a closed population of persons with mental health and addiction issues. It will develop queuing network models to obtain service levels, costs to society and compare various proposed system configurations. Initially the research will focus on abstract models but will subsequently be applied to the Downtown East Side of Vancouver so as to impact policy and practice.