Biomedical subjects

M W Isken

Publications and source records attributed to M W Isken.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

A data mart for operations analysis.

In this article we describe the evolution and architecture of a data mart developed to address the modeling and analysis needs of healthcare operations analysts. More specifically, the data mart is used in projects relating to demand analysis, forecasting, capacity planning, and service system design for a healthcare system consisting of a large tertiary care hospital and a smaller community hospital. The primary focus of the mart is on the detailed movement of inpatients through each hospital, although most component data tables include outpatient information such as emergency center visits, surgical cases, cardiac catheterization cases, and short-stay visits. We show that the data mart goes well beyond consolidating data from different sources by including a number of complex, precalculated fields, data structures, and function libraries that are specific to the needs of operations analysts. We discuss several outstanding and challenging design issues that should be of interest to the data warehouse vendor community.

Bed Occupancy↗

PubMed1998

Tactical staff scheduling analysis for hospital ancillary units.

Hospital ancillary units face difficult staffing problems due to demand variability by time of day and day of week. For such problems, tour scheduling models play an important role in minimizing labor cost while meeting the staffing needs and personnel scheduling constraints of the unit. We describe an approach called tactical scheduling analysis for addressing such problems. The components of such an analysis are detailed and several actual scheduling analysis projects are presented in order to give a sense of the different types of problems faced by ancillary units and how we as engineers try to solve these problems.

Ancillary Services, Hospital↗

PubMed1992

Patient-scheduling methodologies.

Inpatient admissions, surgical scheduling, and outpatient scheduling are three of the most important patient-scheduling functions in the hospital. In this paper, the key elements of state-of-the-art scheduling systems are discussed, along with a rationale for their importance. Our purpose is to show how well-designed patient-scheduling systems can contribute to the improvement of hospital operations.

Admitting Department, Hospital↗

PubMed1991

A heuristic approach to nurse scheduling in hospital units with non-stationary, urgent demand, and a fixed staff size.

We present a practical approach to personnel scheduling problems arising in hospital units with demand that is of an urgent nature, cannot be backlogged, and is highly dependent on the time of day. A simple rounding heuristic is combined with a simulated annealing algorithm to obtain near-optimal solutions to large linear integer programming models of these personnel scheduling problems in a reasonable amount of time on a personal computer. The models are designed to complement the current state-of-the-art of commercially available hospital staff scheduling systems.

Algorithms↗