“What’s the evidence?”—Towards more empirical evaluations of the impact of OR interventions in healthcare

Abstract

Despite an increasing number of papers reporting applications of operational research (OR) to problems in healthcare, there remains little empirical evidence of OR improving healthcare delivery in practice. Without such evidence it is harder both to justify the usefulness of OR to a healthcare audience and to learn and continuously improve our approaches. To progress, we need to build the evidence-base on whether and how OR improves healthcare delivery through careful empirical evaluation. This position paper reviews evaluation standards in healthcare improvement research and dispels some common myths about evaluation. It highlights the current lack of robust evaluation of healthcare OR and makes the case for addressing this. It then proposes possible ways for building better empirical evaluations of OR interventions in healthcare.

Daily food planning for families under Covid-19: combining analytic hierarchy processes and linear optimisation

“…During the intervention we received positive feedback from the participating families. This was possible as the complete OR intervention (Lamé et al, 2020 ) of the proposed model was successfully tested and applied within two young family settings in Brazil. Importantly, the families appreciated not only the developed menu but also other desirable results that this approach yielded.…”

Joining forces: the value of design partnering with operational research to improve healthcare delivery

“…Increasing attention is also paid to the best ways of engaging and working with healthcare organisations and stakeholders in healthcare OR projects (Brailsford et al 2013;Pearson et al 2013). However, there are still very few published examples of successful implementations of OR (Brailsford et al 2009;Brailsford & Vissers 2011), and few published empirical evaluations of the impact of OR on health services (Lamé, Crowe, & Barclay 2022). This shows that despite a steady 5/21 growth in academic healthcare OR over a number of years, its overall influence over healthcare in practice remains uncertain.…”

“…Finally, design and OR share a common challenge in relating to the evaluation-driven tradition of medical disciplines. Published evaluations of OR and design methods remain very rare (Frey & Dym 2006; Gericke et al 2020; Lamé et al 2022): a recent systematic review and meta-analysis of evaluations of systems approaches to improving healthcare delivery did not find any suitable study to include from either a design or OR journal (Komashie et al 2021). This attests to the dearth of rigorous evaluation of the impact of our approaches in improving healthcare delivery.…”

The Role of Systems Approaches in Health and Care

“…There is still work to do as it is known that there is not always a shared understanding between design and health communities with regards to the language of evidence (Lamé et al, 2020).…”