This paper examines the staffing, division of labor, and resulting profitability of primary care physician practices. We develop a theoretical model of how practice profit is determined by the number and mix of support staff and how tasks are delegated to support staff. A key element of the...

Health plans create competition among hospitals by threatening to “steer” patients to preferred facilities. Mergers can reduce this competition and economists have begun using travel cost demand models to predict their effects. In this paper, we document an anomaly in estimation: for any...

Purpose: To demonstrate a simple mathematical model for evaluating operational decisions for preparing compounded sterile products in a hospital pharmacy.Summary: This paper describes a simple mathematical model, based on a small set of parameters easily estimated from existing data. This model...

The wide spread adoption of ERP systems together with customer relationship management applications has increased the ability of a firm to share operational data with customers. In this paper we analyze the factors that determine whether or not this information sharing will benefit the firm. We...

We consider a firm that provides multiple services using both specialized and flexible capacity. The problem is formulated as a two-stage single-period stochastic program. The firm invests in capacity before the actual demand is known and optimally assigns capacity to customers when demand is...

We model a system which consists of a stream of customers processed through three steps by two resources. The first resource, an investigator, handles the first step, in which she collects information from the customer and decides what work will be done in the second step by the second resource,...