This chapter points out serious shortcomings in DEA's treatment of price efficiency, illustrates the dangers of misspecification errors in DEA, and suggests extentions of the basic DEA formulation that address these shortcomings.

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PURPOSE Awareness of and enrollment into outpatient cardiac rehabilitation (OCR) following a cardiac event or procedure remains suboptimal. Thus, it is important to identify new approaches to improve these outcomes. The objectives of this study were to identify: (1) the contributions of a patient navigation (PN) intervention and other patient characteristics on OCR awareness; and (2) the contributions of OCR awareness and other patient characteristics on OCR enrollment among eligible cardiac patients up to 12 weeks post-hospitalization. METHODS In this randomized controlled study, 181 eligible and consenting patients were assigned to either PN (n=90) or Usual Care (UC; n=91) prior to hospital discharge. Awareness of OCR was assessed by telephone interview at 12-weeks posthospitalization and OCR enrollment was confirmed by staff at collaborating OCR programs. Of the 181 study participants, 3 died within 1 month of hospital discharge, and 147 completed the 12-week telephone interview. RESULTS Participants in the PN intervention arm were nearly 6 times more likely to have at least some awareness of OCR compared to UC participants (OR=5.99; P=.001). Moreover, participants who reported at least some OCR awareness were more than 9 times more likely to enroll in OCR (OR=9.27, P=.034), and participants who were married were less likely to enroll (P=.031). CONCLUSIONS Lay health advisors have potential to improve cardiac patient awareness of outpatient rehabilitation services, which in turn can yield greater enrollment rates into a program.

A set of n customers is given. Each customer has a desired point of pickup, a desired point of delivery and a desired time of delivery. The problem is to determine the order of pickup and delivery and the times of pickup and delivery of these n customers by a single vehicle in order to minimize total customer inconvenience. Here, a mathematical programming formulating of this problem is subjected to Benders' decomposition procedure. The result is a heuristic routing and scheduling algorithm which is shown to produce high quality solutions in reasonable computation time by testing on moderately sized real data bases from both Gaithers-burg, Maryland, and Baltimore, Maryland. This study is divided into two parts, the first detailing the scheduling analysis and the second focusing on the routing component.

The results indicate that efficiency improvements would help to alleviate the nation's persistent blood shortages. These findings can be used by blood center managers to identify management interventions that can improve operational efficiency, resulting in greater output with existing levels of resources.

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