Home

Committees

Keynote Speakers

Contact

Programme

Special Issue Journal

Presentations

Abstract

Health Care Delivery Faces Many Strategic and Tactical Problems but We Are Making Progress in Many Areas
                                                                       
William Pierskalla, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus Decisions, Operations and Technology Management, The Anderson School at UCLA, Ronald A. Rosenfeld Professor Emeritus, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

The U.S. and other health care systems face fundamental change over the next ten years. The bad news is: Quality gaps are everywhere. Costs are increasing at double the rates of growth of GDP in many countries. Waste is extensive. Delivery systems are outmoded.  Access for many is restricted.  The keys to improvement are information and decision-aiding models coupled with outcome measures and systems accountability.   The good news is:  Many more OR/MS persons are working on these improvements.  New and excellent work is being done on health care operations management such as: hospital capacity planning, facility locations, supply chain management, ambulance scheduling and routing, analysis of organizational performance, and overcoming barriers to implementation.  New and excellent work is being done on health care policy and economics such as:  estimating risks to public health, modeling economic outcomes of health policies, consequences and benefits of new medications and treatments, policy analyses of the consequences of illicit drugs and addiction programs, evaluation of vaccine programs, prevention and control of infectious diseases and of the consequences of diabetes, and programs for the allocation of human organs for transplant.  New and excellent work is being done on OR/MS models in clinical practice such as:  use of Markov models and influence diagrams for medical treatment decisions, risk reduction in anesthesia procedures, design of optimal new treatments for asthma, Bayesian models for mammogram interpretation, models for better radiation treatment plans for cancer and models of biological processes to discover new therapies and to improve treatment protocols.

I will discuss the bad news, the good news and the pending system and operational changes and challenges facing health care delivery.

For more information, please visit http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/william.pierskalla/