We develop a model and analysis to provide insight into two effective remedies to increase supply chain resilience: (1) contracting with a secondary flexible backup supplier, and (2) monitoring primary suppliers to obtain disruption risk information. To investigate the true value of these...

US healthcare is undergoing a period of substantial change, with many hospitals vertically integrating with physician practices. Such integration could improve quality by promoting care coordination, but could also worsen it by impacting care delivery. Evidence on how physicians alter their...

Assigning partially flexible resources (servers) effectively to various jobs (customers or products) in real-time is a fundamental problem in many applications such as service centers, manufacturing systems, and communication networks. Although the potential benefits of using flexible servers to...

To increase resilience in supply chains, we investigate the optimal design of flexibility in the backup system. We model the dynamics of disruptions as Markov chains, and consider a multi-product, multi-supplier supply chain under dynamic disruption risks. Using our model, we first show that a...

Multi-class queueing systems widely used in operations research and management typically experience ambiguity in real-world settings in the form of unknown parameters. For such systems, we incorporate robustness in the control policies by applying a data-driven percentile optimization technique...

Telemedical Physician Triage (TPT) is an example of a Hierarchical Knowledge-Based Service System (HKBSS), in which a second level of decision agent (telemedical physician) renders a decision on cases referred to him/her by the primary level agents (triage nurses). Managing the...

Crisis level overcrowding conditions in Emergency Departments (ED's) have led hospitals to seek out new patient flow designs to improve both responsiveness and safety. One approach that has attracted attention and experimentation in the emergency medicine community is a system in which ED beds...

Hospital Emergency Departments (ED's) typically use triage systems that classify and prioritize patients almost exclusively in terms of their need for timely care. Using a combination of analytic and simulation models, we demonstrate that adding an up-front estimate of patient complexity to...

A promising new model for the employee health plans of large firms bypasses insurers, instead using direct contracts with hospitals which have been designated as centers of excellence. The authors describe how combining this model with cutting edge analytics could revolutionize the delivery of...

Problem definition: The recent upward trend in the U.S. hospital closures can have important impacts on the healthcare sector by changing the operational efficiency and quality of care of the remaining hospitals. Understanding how hospital closures impact the way the remaining hospitals operate...