Queueing Models of Case Managers

Campello, Fernanda; Ingolfsson, Armann; Shumsky, Robert A.

doi:10.1287/mnsc.2015.2368

Cited by 40 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Other possible directions include modeling for interrupted service/treatment time and parallel tasks for care providers, as physicians may serve multiple patients during the same time window and, thus, have discontinuous service durations for each patient. Campello et al (2016) provide related results for ED case-managers with multiple patient assignments and repeated interactions with each customer. As their results are generated for systems with stationary arrivals and homogeneous servers, more study on discontinuous service in the ED is open for exploration.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying queueing theory to the study of emergency department operations: a survey and a discussion of comparable simulation studies

Barnes

Golden

2017

Int Trans Operational Res

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Queueing models are important tools for the design and management of emergency departments (EDs). In this survey, we examine the contributions of queueing theory (QT) in modeling EDs and assess the strengths and limitations of this application. We include a direct comparison to discrete-event simulation when applied to similar problems, and discuss data acquisition and challenges associated with each method. Specifically, we review applications of QT from the perspective of demand-and supply-side problems, as well as various methodological innovations developed to address the complexities of ED operations. In reviewing relevant articles published since 1970, we found that queueing models tend to oversimplify operations and underestimate congestion levels (especially for smaller systems), and obtain less realistic results than comparable simulation models. The combination of queueing and simulation is shown to be a powerful approach. Future efforts should exploit this and more widely available real-world data.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying queueing theory to the study of emergency department operations: a survey and a discussion of comparable simulation studies

Barnes

Golden

2017

Int Trans Operational Res

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“…Case-manager systems are an example of imbricated service. Campello et al (2017) study such systems where a case-manager deals with the case of a customer that consists of a random number of tasks, interspersed with so called external delays (similar to interludes herein) during which the customer is away completing tasks elsewhere. The maximum number of customers that a case-manager takes on at a time is called the caseload.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The paper investigates the tradeoff between the wait by customers upon arrival which is reduced with an increase in the caseload, and the in-process wait of customers who come back from external delay and find their case-manager working on other customers' cases which is increasing in the caseload. In KC (2013), multitasking in an emergency department is measured by the number of patients simultaneously under care, thus resembling the caseload in Campello et al (2017). Increased caseload has a negative effect on quality in KC (2013), while in Campello et al (2017) increasing the caseload has an effect on wait times.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This limit is called a caseload. Examples of such systems can be a contact center where servers manage multiple online chats (Legros and Jouini, 2019), or an emergency department where physicians treat multiple patients simultaneously (Campello et al, 2017). While our main research question is how to make use of interludes in the presence of switching times between front and back-office tasks, we also explore the effect of an exogenously determined caseload on this main problem.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Front-office multitasking between service encounters and back-office tasks

Legros¹,

Jouini

Akşin

et al. 2020

European Journal of Operational Research

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We model the work of a front-line service worker as a queueing system. The server interacts with customers in a multi-stage process with random durations. Some stages require an interaction between server and customer, while other stages are performed by the customer as a self-service task or with the help of another resource. Random arrivals by customers at the beginning and during an encounter create random lengths of idle time in the work of the server (breaks and interludes respectively). The server considers treatment of an infinite amount of back-office tasks, or tasks that do not require interaction with the customer, during these idle times. We consider an optimal control problem for the server's work. The main question we explore is whether to use the interludes in service encounters for treating back-office, when the latter incur switching times. Under certain operating environments, working on back-office during interludes is shown to be valuable. Switching times play a critical role in the optimal control of the server's work, at times leading the server to prefer remaining idle during breaks and interludes, instead of working on back-office, and at others to continue back-office in the presence of waiting customers. The optimal policy for use of the interludes is one with multiple thresholds depending on both the customers queueing for service, and the ones who are in-service. We illustrate that in settings with multiple interludes in an encounter, if at all, the back-office work should be concentrated on fewer, longer and later interludes.

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“…In a multistage multiserver interconnected queueing setting, Campello, Ingolfsson, and Shumsky () propose a stochastic model of a baseline case‐manager system. They define a case manager as a server who is assigned multiple customers and has frequent, repeated interactions with each customer until the customer's service is completed (eg, emergency department physicians).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal control policies in service systems with limited information on the downstream stage

Ansari

Iravani

Qi-feng

2019

Naval Research Logistics

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Existing models in multistage service systems assume full information on the state of downstream stages. In this paper, we investigate how much the lack of such information impacts jobs' waiting time in a two‐stage system with two types of jobs at the first stage. The goal is to find the optimal control policy for the server at the first stage to switch between type‐1 and type‐2 jobs, while minimizing the long‐run average number of jobs in the system. We identify control policies and corresponding conditions under which having no or partial information, the system can still capture the most benefit of having full information.

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Queueing Models of Case Managers

Cited by 40 publications

References 35 publications

Applying queueing theory to the study of emergency department operations: a survey and a discussion of comparable simulation studies

Applying queueing theory to the study of emergency department operations: a survey and a discussion of comparable simulation studies

Front-office multitasking between service encounters and back-office tasks

Optimal control policies in service systems with limited information on the downstream stage

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