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The Changing Role Of Ancillary Health Care Service Providers: An Evaluation Of Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Inc., Steven M. Thompson, Stephen Varvel, Szilard Voros, Dawn Thiselton, Shahrzad Grami, Ralph M. Turner, John Barron Apr 2014

The Changing Role Of Ancillary Health Care Service Providers: An Evaluation Of Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Inc., Steven M. Thompson, Stephen Varvel, Szilard Voros, Dawn Thiselton, Shahrzad Grami, Ralph M. Turner, John Barron

Management Faculty Publications

In an effort to reduce cost and improve quality, health care payers have enacted a number of incentives to motivate providers to focus their efforts on achieving better clinical outcomes and reducing the prevalence and progression of disease. In response to these incentives, providers are entering into new arrangements such as accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical homes to redesign delivery processes and achieve quality and cost objectives. This article reports the results of a study designed to evaluate the impact on cost and quality of care resulting from services provided by Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Inc., a clinical laboratory with …


Integrated Block Sharing: A Win–Win Strategy For Hospitals And Surgeons, Robert Watson Day, Robert Garfinkel, Steven M. Thompson Oct 2012

Integrated Block Sharing: A Win–Win Strategy For Hospitals And Surgeons, Robert Watson Day, Robert Garfinkel, Steven M. Thompson

Management Faculty Publications

We consider the problem of balancing two competing objectives in the pursuit of efficient management of operating rooms in a hospital: providing surgeons with predictable, reliable access to the operating room and maintaining high utilization of capacity. The common solution to the first problem (in practice) is to grant exclusive “block time,” in which a portion of the week in an operating room is designated to a particular surgeon, barring other surgeons from using this room/time. As a major improvement over this existing approach, we model the possibility of “shared” block time, which need only satisfy capacity constraints in expectation. …


Or Practice—Efficient Short-Term Allocation And Reallocation Of Patients To Floors Of A Hospital During Demand Surges, Steven M. Thompson, Manuel Nunez, Robert Garfinkel, Matthew D. Dean Mar 2009

Or Practice—Efficient Short-Term Allocation And Reallocation Of Patients To Floors Of A Hospital During Demand Surges, Steven M. Thompson, Manuel Nunez, Robert Garfinkel, Matthew D. Dean

Management Faculty Publications

Many hospitals face the problem of insufficient capacity to meet demand for inpatient beds, especially during demand surges. This results in quality degradation of patient care due to large delays from admission time to the hospital until arrival at a floor. In addition, there is loss of revenue because of the inability to provide service to potential patients. A solution to the problem is to proactively transfer patients between floors in anticipation of a demand surge. Optimal reallocation poses an extraordinarily complex problem that can be modeled as a finite-horizon Markov decision process. Based on the optimization model, a decision-support …