Advanced Decision Making Methods Applied to Health Care

Workforce Management based on forecasted demand.- Operating rooms scheduling under uncertainty.- Idealised design and modelling of alternatives to hospital care.- A coordination model for enhancing research on rare diseases.- Integrating simulation and risk-based sensitivity analysis methods in hospital emergency department design.- Technical and scale efficiencies of Catholic hospitals: Does a system value of stewardship matter?- Optimal allocation of urban nuclei to hospital birth centres in a geographical region.- The nurse-to-patient assigment problem in Home Care services.- An analysis of the financial statements of Italian health care providers through correlation-based networks.- Prioritizing health care interventions: A multicriteria resource allocation model to inform the choice of community care programmes.- Using data envelopment analysis for formative evaluation of radiotherapy services: An exploratory study.- A simulation-based decision support tool to analyze clinical pathways in hospital.- Patient mix optimisation for inpatient planning with multiple resources.

From the book reviews:“This text is composed of 13 chapters that focus on applications of quantitative strategies in the area of health care research. … All the chapters are structured well and are consistent in style and presentation. Each paper begins with an abstract and ends with a list of references. … The book is transdisciplinary in nature; it will serve as a good reference to professionals and policy makers working in health care.” (S. E. Ahmed, Technometrics, Vol. 56 (1), January, 2014)“This book is a collation of quantitative methodologies that focus on operational research, statistical and economic decision-making, and problems in the field of healthcare. The authors strive to deliver a book that collects extant issues in healthcare and focuses on practical problem-solving applications for these issues. The book meets this objective admirably. … the book is written for an interdisciplinary and wide audience. … This is a well-written and comprehensive book that would complement any healthcare manager’s (or evaluator’s) reference library.” (Eric P. Matthews, Doody’s Book Reviews, July, 2013)