The operations research approach to health services

Just-published paper with a different perspective on HSR:

 

OR in Healthcare: A European Perspective

Sally Brailsford^a and Jan Vissers^{b, ,}

^a School of Management, University of Southampton. Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
^b Institute of Health Policy and Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, PO Box 1738 3000 DR Rotterdam NL, and School of Industrial Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513 5600 MB Eindhoven NL

Received 18 October 2009; 

accepted 16 October 2010. 

Available online 26 October 2010.

Abstract

The European Working Group “Operations Research Applied to Health Services” (ORAHS) is one of the domain specific EURO Working Groups organized by EURO - the European Association of Operational Research Societies. In this paper we report on the development of ORAHS as a platform for OR in health, and analyse the papers presented at meetings over the 35 years of its existence. We propose a two-way framework for analysis, where one dimension is the nine stages of the product life cycle: identifying consumer requirements, designing a new service to meet these requirements, forecasting demand for such a service, securing resources for it, allocating these resources, developing programs & plans to use these resources for delivering the service, establishing criteria for service delivery, managing the performance of the service, and finally, evaluating its performance. The other dimension is a three-level classification into broad application areas referring to processes at different levels in healthcare: patients & providers, units & hospitals, and regional & national. We use this framework to carry out a quantitative analysis of all the papers presented during the meetings of ORAHS since its inception in 1975. We then describe developments over this period in applying OR approaches and techniques to health care, and present an overview of the main application areas and challenges.

Keywords: OR in health services; review