Decision making in healthcare
Résumé
This special issue of Decision Support System journal includes seven papers selected from the best contributions at the special track on Healthcare Information and Decision Making in the framework of the 8th ENIM IFAC International Conference of Modeling and Simulation (MOSIM 2010), which took place in Hammamet (Tunisia) during May 2010. As usual, every paper accepted to be presented at the conference, was reviewed twice and the three referees' decisions were strictly respected. They present substantial advances in the research of healthcare decision making.
Hospitals throughout Europe are undergoing large changes, due in part to transformations in demography and in part to increased competition among hospitals. These changes have lead to a destabilization in the way hospitals usually work and in their economic balance. Hospital managers need to optimize their system to meet the new reality of customers' demands. Decision support systems are generally defined as any computer program designed to assist professionals in decision-making tasks. Management decision support systems can help managers and administrators as well as clinicians, to efficiently plan, assign and control human and material resources. From the long term to short
term, decision support systems assist decision maker at every decision level.
The first four papers focus on strategic decisions. Combes and Azema propose a new clustering approach based on principal component analysis, in order to find automatically groups of elderly people living in nursing homes. The identification of residents' profiles describing the level of autonomy-disability, allows decision makers to improve the nursing and social service organization and planning. In the second paper, Benzarti et al. focus on the districting problem applied to home health care (HHC) structures. The districting of a territory is a strategic HHC decision which consists in grouping sets of patients into districts according to relevant criteria. Huet et al. investigate a new methodology of modeling the interactions between the medication use processes (MUP) of the hospital with the hospital information system. The aim of this work is to develop a generic decision making tool to help the pharmacists and managers to organize the MUP. Tancrez et al.'s paper investigates the impact of the randomness such as operating times or the unexpected emergencies, in operating theaters. The authors develop tools to help managers to dimension the operating theater and to rationalize their decisions. The two following papers treat of tactic problems. Cordier and Riane model the patient appointment system. In order to improve the system, they develop algorithmic and mathematical programming tools. In the second paper, Sadki et al. investigate the medical planning problem of oncology ambulatory cares in order to best balance the bed capacity requirement. Their approach is based on mixed integer programming models. The last paper deals with an operational problem. Hanset et al. investigate surgical cases scheduling taking into account human and material resources. Their decision making tool is based on constraint programming.
Almost all of the papers realize numerical experiments on data collected from the field. They investigate major decision problems in the healthcare sectors. The guest editors would like to thank the authors for their contribution to this special issue and the reviewers for their valuable work.