Dynamic Programming in Health Care

The OBAIS department at the Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati, invites you to attend the following research seminar.

Date & Time: Friday, April 10, 2015, 1:30 PM
Location : UC Carl H. Lindner Hall, Room 219
Speaker: Dr. Steven Shechter, Associate Professor, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia

TOPIC: Approximate Dynamic Programming in Health Care: Linear Programming and Simulation Based Approaches

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss two distinct health care projects that are naturally modeled  as Markov decision processes, but which face the curse of dimensionality.  The first problem concerns blood issuing policies for hospital blood banks.  We describe our use of LP-­‐based ADP approaches for finding policies that outperform existing policies regarding the inherent freshness/shortage trade-­‐offs.  The second problem concerns the effective allocation of operating room time for elective surgeries at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital.  Here, we apply simulation-­‐based methods for dealing with the complex state dynamics as well as the large  state space of the underlying MDP.  

Via Uday S. Rao, Associate Professor
Operations, Business Analytics, and Information Systems (OBAIS)
Email: raous@ucmail.uc.edu     @UCBusAnalytics