Operational research techniques applied throughout cancer care services: a review

Saville, Christina; Smith, Honora; Bijak, Katarzyna

doi:10.1080/20476965.2017.1414741

Cited by 26 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 104 publications

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“…The largest part of the studies addresses the patient appointment scheduling for the infusion activity and the assignment of the daily slots to nurses, focusing on the operational level, rather than tactical or strategic levels (Saville et al 2019).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Master chemotherapy planning and clinicians rostering in a hospital outpatient cancer centre

Carello

Landa

Tànfani

et al. 2021

Cent Eur J Oper Res

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In the past years, the number of patients in need of chemotherapy treatments has been constantly increasing. Chemotherapy treatments must be carefully planned to provide a suitable and timely care. They are often provided within an outpatient setting. Clinicians and nurses staff must face the increasing demand for chemotherapy treatment with limited resources, such as exam rooms, beds, and seats. In this work, we consider a cancer centre shared among different oncologist specialties, as suggested by the Organisation of European Cancer Institutes. We focus on the oncologist visit that each patient must undergo before the drug infusion, to check if the patient's conditions are compatible with the drug infusion. We consider the problem of planning the weekly assignment of consultation rooms to cancer pathologies, referred to as Master Chemotherapy Planning. Further, we jointly address the problem of selecting a clinician with suitable skills to cover each consultation room in the weekly schedule, given the cliniciansávailability over a month. Several criteria are considered, such as the number of visits in overtime, the amount of met demand and the clinicians' workload. The problem is formulated as a lexicographic multiobjective optimisation problem B Paolo Landa

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Master chemotherapy planning and clinicians rostering in a hospital outpatient cancer centre

Carello

Landa

Tànfani

et al. 2021

Cent Eur J Oper Res

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“…Carello et al (2021) mention that the literature on outpatient chemotherapy activities is sparse compared to other areas of application with similar features, such as multi-appointment scheduling in healthcare (Marynissen et al 2019). A literature review on operations research techniques applied throughout cancer care services can be found in Saville et al (2019). Moreover, the review paper of Lamé (2016) provides an overview on outpatient chemotherapy planning.…”

Section: Outpatient Chemotherapy Planning and Clinicians Rosteringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Central European journal of operations research (CJOR) “operations research applied to health services (ORAHS) in Europe: general trends and ORAHS 2020 conference in Vienna, Austria”

Aringhieri

Hirsch

Rauner

et al. 2021

Cent Eur J Oper Res

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This articles provides a short summary of the research topics and latest research results of the European Working Group “Operations Research Applied to Health Services” (ORAHS) organized as an e-conference in Juli 2020 at the University of Vienna, Austria (https://orahs2020.univie.ac.at/). Furthermore, challenges for OR in health care including application areas, decision support systems, general trends, and modelling techniques are briefly illustrated from an European and international perspective by providing selected essential literature reviews.

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“…Operations research (OR) is a discipline that includes a range of techniques aimed at improving decision-making processes in many areas. Combining knowledge from applied mathematics, computer science, and industrial engineering, OR methods such as computer simulation [ 9 ] and mathematical programming [ 10 ] have been widely used to propose solutions for complex real-world problems, including the health care field [ 11 , 12 ]. Recent studies have shown that there is very little scientific reporting on implementation of OR-based algorithms in clinical practice [ 13 , 14 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Radiotherapy treatment scheduling: Implementing operations research into clinical practice

et al. 2021

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Background Every week, radiotherapy centers face the complex task of scheduling hundreds of treatment sessions amongst the available linear accelerators. With the increase in cancer patient numbers, manually creating a feasible and efficient schedule has shown to be a difficult, time-consuming task. Although operations research models have been increasingly reported upon to optimize patient care logistics, there is almost no scientific evidence of implementation in practice. Methods A mathematical operations research model was adapted to generate radiotherapy treatment schedules in two Dutch centers. The model was iteratively adjusted to fulfill the technical and medical constraints of each center until a valid model was attained. Patient data was collected for the planning horizon of one week, and the feasibility of the obtained schedules was verified by the staff of each center. The resulting optimized solutions are compared with the ones manually developed in practice. Results The weekly schedule was improved in both centers by decreasing the average standard deviation between sessions’ starting times from 103.0 to 50.4 minutes (51%) in one center, and the number of gaps in the schedule from 18 to 5 (72%) in the other. The number of patients requiring linac switching between sessions has also decreased from 71 to 0 patients in one center, and from 43 to 2 in the other. The automated process required 5 minutes and 1.5 hours of computation time to find an optimal weekly patient schedule, respectively, as opposed to approximately 1.5 days when performed manually for both centers. Conclusions The practical application of a theoretical operations research model for radiotherapy treatment scheduling has provided radiotherapy planners a feasible, high-quality schedule in an automated way. Iterative model adaptations performed in small steps, early engagement of stakeholders, and constant communication proved to facilitate the implementation of operations research models into clinical practice.

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Operational research techniques applied throughout cancer care services: a review

Cited by 26 publications

References 104 publications

Master chemotherapy planning and clinicians rostering in a hospital outpatient cancer centre

Master chemotherapy planning and clinicians rostering in a hospital outpatient cancer centre

Central European journal of operations research (CJOR) “operations research applied to health services (ORAHS) in Europe: general trends and ORAHS 2020 conference in Vienna, Austria”

Radiotherapy treatment scheduling: Implementing operations research into clinical practice

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