by Bonnie Eissner
With the outbreak of Ebola in
Africa and the looming threat of avian flu and other highly transmissible
diseases, the threat of a pandemic has taken on a new urgency, at least in the
public consciousness. According to Jiang Zhang, Ph.D., an associate professor
at the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business, the U.S. government has been
concerned for some time about the possibility of an influenza or avian
influenza outbreak. What would this look like? The Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention estimates that it could mean from just shy of a million to more
than nine and a half million hospitalized victims...
Recently, Dr. Zhang, an
operations management expert, teamed up with a colleague, Lihui Bai, an assistant
professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of
Louisville, to examine how patients can be enticed to choose the hospitals that
will best serve them.
At the heart of the issue is the unequal
distribution of hospitals and hospital beds. Urban areas, such as New York City,
have larger, more prominent hospitals. But the demand for beds is much greater.
During a pandemic, this imbalance could lead to bottlenecks at city and
suburban hospitals, while rural hospitals remain underutilized.
How do you spur people to travel
to the hospitals that will serve them most efficiently? One option is for the
government to assign people to particular hospitals. Another is to entice them.
Dr. Zhang and Dr. Bai showed that
an incentive-based model is as effective as an assignment-based model. And it’s
likely to be more palatable.
They used a simple incentive:
shorter wait times. According to the model, shorter wait times can be used to
offset the time spent traveling to more distant hospitals. The model is akin to
using tolls to encourage drivers to use less crowded roads, bridges and
tunnels.
The study, published in 2014 in
the International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, has drawn significant attention. Dr. Zhang
said, “The reason our paper has been picked by the journal and sent out was
because it’s relatively new…in this type of setting.”
Dr. Zhang noted that as hospitals and doctors focus more on service
delivery and cost savings, operations management models and expertise will
become more relevant. Already, he is working on another hospital-related study,
and he said that the physicians who participate in Adelphi’s M.B.A. program are
showing increased interest in understanding how to apply business models to
their own work. Both are examples of how operations management is becoming more
interdisciplinary.
This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Erudition.