Healthcare Operations Management: A Holistic Care Chain Perspective

Addressing the entire care chain, this book presents the outcomes of advanced research on healthcare operations management based on real-world data and practices in China. It includes hands-on methods and applications in this interdisciplinary research field, which combines healthcare service, operations management, industrial engineering and information technology.

The content is divided into three parts, reflecting the entire care chain. The first part discusses the pre-hospital service stage and explores resource deployment problems in emergency medical service, such as ambulance allocation. The second part focuses on inpatient care services, including staffing and task allocation among nurses and doctors based on multi-project management under uncertainties. In addition, a highly promising diagnosis approach is proposed and a specific algorithm is derived on the basis of real-world datasets which can improve the diagnosis accuracy remarkably. In turn, the third part considers the post-hospital service stage, which most often takes place at community hospitals, and provides a quantitative evaluation and optimization of scheduling for tasks and team members for home care services.

The book is intended for a broad audience, including students, researchers and practitioners working in various areas of healthcare management, service management, and operations management.

Dr. Qiang Su is a Full Professor at the Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, China. He has previously served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, China and as a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Industrial and System Engineering, Florida International University, USA. He is Vice President of the Chinese Healthcare Operations Management Association and has served as Principal Investigator in several National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) projects focusing on healthcare management and intelligent manufacturing. He has written/translated 5 books and published more than 200 journal papers. A senior member of the IEEE, ASQ and CAQ and member of POMS, his research interests include quality management, process optimization and data analytics, and intelligent decisions.