2015 Informs Annual Meeting

TB41

INFORMS Philadelphia – 2015

3 - Building Temperature Control with User Feedback and Energy Optimization John Wen, Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, CII 5015, 110 8th St., Troy, NY, 12180, United States of America, wenj@rpi.edu Buildings are occupied by multiple occupants with different comfort preferences in a shared space. This paper proposes a distributed incentive based strategy to balance the user comfort feedback and building energy optimization. We establish the convergence of the proposed algorithm to the optimal temperature set-point that minimizes the total energy cost and the aggregate discomfort of all occupants. 4 - Green Technology Innovations, Adoption, and Regulation Xin Wang, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, When a government is considering tightening a standard on a pollutant, their decision often is influenced by the number of firms being able to meet the tightened standard, because a higher number indicates a more feasible standard. We study how such regulation may affect a firm’s incentive to develop a new technology to reduce a pollutant. We find that stricter regulation may discourage a firm to develop a new technology, but may encourage other firms to adopt the technology once it is invented. Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States of America, xinwang1@andrew.cmu.edu, Alan Scheller-wolf

4 - A Data-driven Stochastic Model of an Emergency Department Xiaopei Zhang, Columbia University, 1 Morningside Drive, Apt. 1710, New York, NY, 10025, United States of America, xz2363@columbia.edu, Ward Whitt We explore arrival and length-of-stay (LoS) data from an Israeli Emergency Department. We fit a time-varying two-class (hospitalized or not) infinite-server queueing model with nonhomogeneous Poisson arrivals, where the arrival rate/admission/LoS is periodic over a week/day/day. Departures after long LoS tend to occur at midnight. TB42 42-Room 102B, CC Joint Session MSOM-Health/HAS: Global Health Delivery Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Healthcare Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Jonas Jonasson, Student, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4SA, United Kingdom, jjonasson@london.edu 1 - Demand vs. Supply-side Investment in Humanitarian Operations Karthik V. Natarajan, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota, 321 19th Avenue South, 3-150, Minneapolis, MN, United States of America, knataraj@umn.edu, Jayashankar Swaminathan Both supply- and demand-side constraints impact program coverage in humanitarian settings. We first study the problem of identifying the optimal mix of supply- and demand-side investments faced by a budget-constrained organization in a centralized setting. We then consider a decentralized setting and identify the optimal performance-based contract to mobilize demand. In addition, we also compare the performance of the optimal contract against three contracts frequently used in practice. 2 - Assessing the Impact of U.S. Food Assistance Delivery Policies on Child Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa Alex Nikulkov, Stanford GSB, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, United States of America, nikulkov@stanford.edu, Lawrence Wein The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that delivers its food assistance via transoceanic shipments of commodity-based in-kind food, which is more costly and less timely than cash-based assistance. Using household survey data, geospatial data and supply chain modeling, we estimate that child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa can be reduced by 16.2% if the U.S. switches entirely to cash- based interventions. 3 - How Good are Uniform Co-Payments in Increasing Market Consumption? Gonzalo Romero, Rotman School of Management, 105 St. George Street, Toronto, Canada, Gonzalo.Romero@rotman.utoronto.ca, Retsef Levi, Georgia Perakis We analyze the problem of a central planner allocating co-payment subsidies to competing heterogeneous firms, under an endogenous market response and a budget constraint. We present the first worst-case performance guarantees in maximizing market consumption for the frequently implemented policy of uniform co-payments. Namely, allocating the same co-payment to each firm is guaranteed to induce a significant fraction of the optimal market consumption, even if the firms are highly heterogeneous. 4 - Deployment Guidelines for Community Health Workers in Sub- Saharan Africa Jonas Jonasson, Student, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4SA, United Kingdom, jjonasson@london.edu, Anne Liu, Sarang Deo, Jérémie Gallien, Carri Chan Community health workers (CHWs) are increasingly important to the delivery of health care in many African countries. Leveraging an extensive dataset featuring time, clinical findings and GPS information for CHW visits in Ghana, we develop a stochastic model describing the health dynamics of a population served by a time-constrained CHW. This model supports the design of managerial guidelines for the patient prioritization, catchment area assignment and task profile definition in a CHW operation.

TB41 41-Room 102A, CC ED Operations Management Sponsor: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Healthcare Operations Sponsored Session

Chair: Vedat Verter, James Mcgill Professor, Desaultels Faculty of Management, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC, H3A 1G5, Canada, vedat.verter@mcgill.ca 1 - Specialist Care in Rural Hospitals: from Emergency Department Consultation to Ward Discharge Michael Klein, PhD Candidate, McGill University, Desautels Faculty of Management, Montreal, Canada, michael.klein2@mail.mcgill.ca, Vedat Verter, Brian G. Moses, Hughie F. Fraser Patients often wait for admission to inpatient wards, boarding on stretchers in hallways. These delays are the key contributor to Emergency Department (ED) crowding, resulting in adverse effects including higher mortality. We consider the ED boarding problem from the perspective of specialists. We focus on Internal Medicine at two hospitals in Nova Scotia, Canada. We propose a stochastic dynamic programming model to analyze current practice and identify strategies for improvement. 2 - Impact of Coordination and Information Sharing in Urban Incident Response Jonathan Helm, Indiana University Bloomington, 1309 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN, United States of America, helmj@indiana.edu, Alex Mills, Andres Jola-sanchez, Mohan Tatikonda, Bobby Courtney Following a disaster in an urban area, on-scene responders must decide how to distribute casualties among hospitals. This is typically done without information (real-time or otherwise) about hospital capacities, ED and inpatient. We study a new type of organization, called a healthcare coalition, and use real data to study what types of information this organization should share with responders after a multiple casualty incident to improve response. 3 - Optimal Admission/Discharge Criteria for Patients with Heart Failure in Observation Units Sanket Bhat, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Room 520, Montreal, QC, H3A 1G5, Canada, sanket.bhat@mcgill.ca, Beste Kucukyazici, Rick Mah Although more than 80% of the patients presented to Emergency Departments with symptoms related to acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) are hospitalized, the majority of patients are not in need of an acute intervention beyond decongestion. These patients could be managed in observation units and be discharged without hospitalization. We develop a stochastic model that dynamically assess the risk levels of ADHF patients, and determine criteria to optimally discharge, observe, or admit them.

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