Research
Operations Research Offers Solution to Staff Scheduling Challenges at BC Cancer Agency
Sauder and the BCCA collaborate on Radiation Therapy
New System Reduces Waitlisting for Chemotherapy
Sauder Prof. Martin Puterman has won an award for innovation.
The Impact of Bullying Environments on Nurses’ Turnover Intentions
Are nurses subject to more coworker bullying than those in other occupations? Are nurses who are bullied by coworkers more likely to intend to quit?
Chemotherapy Appointment Scheduling at BCCA Vancouver Centre
The Ambulatory Care Chemotherapy Unit at the BC Cancer Agency Vancouver Centre delivers nearly 15,000 outpatient treatments per year. Clinical complexity, high resource utilization and scheduling restrictions led to multiple operational problems, including a significant waitlist, late appointment confirmation and extensive clerical rework. We redesigned the appointment booking process and developed an optimization model to allocate appointments to nurses, balancing workload and complexity. The new processes were implemented in June 2010 and the optimization-based tool is being used on a daily basis to schedule patients. We present the problem, approach and results, and discuss our experience during implementation.
Sauder Grads Apply Skills to Spinal Cord Project
Bridging the health care industry with the world of operations research can be challenging – but there is nothing that recent Sauder School of Business graduates Rachel Lewis and Argelio Santos welcome more.
“Working in health care in operations research is about giving people the tools they need to make decisions and even though we are not dealing with the lives of patients directly, our work will impact them,” says Santos.
Health Care and Business Concepts Linked in Collaborative Nursing Study
Can you remember a time when a health care provider went beyond the call of duty? Maybe a nurse spent extra time getting to know you or held your hand during a difficult time. In health care, this is known as patient-centred care. Dr. Daniel Skarlicki, Edgar F. Kaiser Chair of Organizational Behaviour and professor [...]
Prostate Cancer Treatment Research Team Wins Best Paper Award
A team of researchers from the Sauder School of Business and the BC Cancer Agency was the recipients of the 2009 William Pierskalla Best Paper Award, which recognizes research excellence in the field of health care management science. The paper, titled “When to Treat Prostate Cancer Patients Based on Their PSA Dynamics”, presents a “novel [...]
Operations Research Project puts New Tool for Survival Analysis in Surgeon’s Hands
In the life and death world of transplant survival prediction, surgeons need easy access to a variety of information about both an organ donor and potential recipients to make accurate decisions about patient risk and organ allocation. Yet, interpreting the complex statistics and math models that present these data can challenge the most expert physician, [...]
Optimal Search with Application to Minimally Invasive Surgery
Ghassemi, F., Shechter, S.M., Nguan, C.Y.C., & Puterman, M.L. Optimal Search with Application to Minimally Invasive Surgery.
Patient focus in ACU research study could help cut wait time by 70 %
Dr. Martin L. Puterman, Research Director of the CHCM and Professor of Operations Research at the Sauder School of Business, knows that protecting the human face of health care – the patient – can be one of the biggest challenges managers face in improving efficiencies. So when the BC Cancer Agency (BCCA) approached Dr. Puterman, [...]
