Design and Control Principles for Mobile Health Care Operations Management -- The Case of Asthma Control

2005年，美国有650万儿童患有哮喘，这是一种慢性呼吸道疾病，其特征是呼吸困难。由于缺乏常规和持续的卫生保健，儿童哮喘通过急诊室就诊和住院给社区带来严重负担。 非营利组织，如移动的C.A.R.E.基金会（MCF），通过定期访问美国大都市地区的学校，为儿童哮喘提供移动的护理。 移动的医疗需要一系列复杂的运营决策，包括患者调度和能力分配，这对于确保有效实现社区卫生目标至关重要。本研究探讨了移动的环境中的运营决策及其对社区健康结果的影响之间的联系。 三个关键方面的研究环境，慢性病护理，移动的交付和非营利环境，需要创建一个新的家庭的运营研究模型的规划，调度和资源分配在卫生保健业务相比，传统的设置，如初级保健诊所和医院门诊部。这项研究将在许多层面产生重大影响。 运筹学技术可以大大提高MCF的能力，以可持续的方式为芝加哥地区服务不足社区的儿童提供基本的卫生服务。在经济衰退期间，这种业务改进尤其重要。 这些见解将用于创建一套最佳操作实践，并传播给其他运营移动的诊所以治疗哮喘以外的慢性疾病的组织。新的业务模式将有助于不断扩大的保健业务领域，并刺激在各种环境下的研究，如糖尿病、无家可归者和老年人的移动的保健，以及非洲的移动的艾滋病毒诊所。该研究将积极吸引研究生和本科生参与分析研究和实地工作。

In 2005, 6.5 million children in the United States suffered from asthma, a chronic respiratory disease characterized by periods of difficulty in breathing. Childhood asthma places severe burden on communities through emergency room visits and hospitalization due to lack of access to routine and continuous health care. Non-profit organizations, such as the Mobile C.A.R.E. Foundation (MCF), provide mobile care for childhood asthma through periodic visits to schools in metropolitan areas across the United States. Mobile care entails a complex array of operational decisions, including patient scheduling and capacity allocation, which are critical to ensuring that community health objectives are met effectively. This research investigates the link between operational decisions in a mobile environment and their impact on the community health outcomes. Three critical aspects of the research setting, chronic care, mobile delivery and non-profit environment, necessitate the creation of a new family of operations research models for planning, scheduling and resource allocation in health care operations compared to those developed for conventional settings such as primary care clinics and hospital outpatient departments. This research will have significant impact at many levels. Operations research techniques can greatly improve the ability of MCF to provide essential health services to children from underserved communities in the Chicago region in a sustainable manner. Such operational improvement is especially critical during an economic downturn. The insights will be used to create a set of operational best practices to be disseminated to other organizations that operate mobile clinics for chronic conditions beyond asthma. The new operations models will contribute to the growing field of health care operations, and stimulate research in settings as varied as mobile health care for diabetes and for homeless and elderly, and mobile HIV clinics in Africa. The research will actively engage graduate and undergraduate students in analytical research and field work.