9/5/19 | 4:15pm | E51-335
Reception to follow.

Carri Chan

Associate Professor
Columbia Business School 

Abstract: Healthcare is a limited resource environment where scarce capacity is often reserved for the most severe patients. However, there has been a growing interest in the use of preventive care to provide treatment to patients early on, before they deteriorate.  On one hand, providing care for patients when they are less critical could mean that fewer resources are needed to return them to a healthy, stable state.  On the other hand, utilizing limited capacity for patients who may never need care in the future takes the capacity away from other more critical patients who need it now.  To understand this tension, we propose a multi-server queueing model with two patient classes: moderate and urgent.  A moderate patient who does not receive treatment may recover and leave or may deteriorate and become an urgent patient.  In this setting, we characterize how moderate and urgent patients should be prioritized for care when proactive care for moderate patients is an option. We identify a parameter, the modified $c\mu/\theta$-index, which plays an important role in determining the optimal scheduling policy.  This index lends itself to an intuitive interpretation of how to balance holding costs, service time, abandonment, and degradation of patient class. Talk based on joint work with Yue Hu and Jing Dong.

Bio: Carri Chan is an Associate Professor of Business in the Decision, Risk and Operations Division at Columbia Business School. Her research is in the area of healthcare operations management. Her primary focus is in data-driven modeling of complex stochastic systems, efficient algorithmic design for queuing systems, dynamic control of stochastic processing systems, and econometric analysis of healthcare systems. Her research combines empirical and stochastic modeling to develop evidence-based approaches to improve patient flow through hospitals. She has worked with clinicians and administrators in numerous hospital systems including Northern California Kaiser Permanente, New York Presbyterian, and Montefiore Medical Center. She is the recipient of a 2014 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award and the 2016 Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) Wickham Skinner Early Career Award. She received her BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT and MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.