Perspectives on Health-Care Resource Management Problems

Research devoted to health-care applications has grown increasingly within operations research over the past 30 years, with over 200 presentations at the 2008 INFORMS conference. Resource management is of particular importance within healthcare because of the system’s unique objectives and challenges. We provide a perspective of the current health-care literature, focusing on recent papers in planning and scheduling and reviewing them along four dimensions: (1) who or what is being scheduled, (2) the time horizon of the scheduling or planning, (3) the level of uncertainty inherent in the planning, and (4) the decision criteria. With this perspective on the literature we observe that the problems at the extreme ends of the time dimension deserve more attention: long-term planning/slash staffing and real-time task assignment.

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