To choose the appropriate resources for their healthcare needs (primary care (GP) or emergency department (ED)), patients seeking acute care must self-triage based on their own assessments of symptoms and severity. However, as patients typically lack sufficient medical knowledge, self-triage...

Food waste is a severe economic and social problem. Restaurants contribute significantly to food waste because they face the classic trade-off between speed of service and leftover inventory, which is particularly crucial in the context of quick service restaurants (QSRs). To offer a high speed...

Using data from over 300,000 visits to an emergency department (ED), we study the accuracy of gatekeeping decisions (admission to the hospital or discharge home) and the effectiveness of a second gatekeeping stage (a clinical decision unit (CDU) in our context) at reducing gatekeeping errors....

Continuity of care, defined as an ongoing therapeutic relationship between a patient and a physician, is a defining characteristic of primary care services. However, arranging a consultation with one's regular doctor is increasingly difficult as practices seek to improve daily throughput to...

Relational continuity (RC) refers to an ongoing relationship between a patient and a clinician or clinical team beyond a specific service encounter or disease episode. As a defining characteristic of good medical practice, RC has been shown to confer many clinical and operational advantages and...

While medical research has addressed the clinical management of chronic opioid users, little is known about how operational interventions shortly after opioid initiation can impact a patient's likelihood of long-term opioid use. Using a nationwide US database of medical and pharmaceutical...

Problem definition: Treating many blood-related diseases requires transplantation of genetically compatible hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) extracted from the bone marrow (BM) of live donors or the umbilical cord blood (CB) of babies. To facilitate the search for HSCs, institutions known as BM...