ISyE Seminar Series: Hayriye Ayhan

"Optimizing the Interaction between Residents and Attending Physicians"

Presentation by Professor Hayriye Ayhan
Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
 

Wednesday, September 9
3:30-4:30 PM CST — Reception and Seminar
 

About:

We analyze how attending physicians should allocate their time between the residents they supervise and their own responsibilities. Under the assumption that a holding cost is incurred when residents and patients wait for a conference with the attending physician, we show that there are only two policies that could maximize the long-run average reward. Namely, it is optimal for the attending physician to start having consultations with the residents either when the residents can no longer examine new patients or as soon as there is a patient ready for conference. Furthermore, we show that the optimality condition is a simple threshold on the holding cost. We then characterize when each of these policies is profitable and the optimum number of residents (supervised by the attending physician) under each policy. We show that if a health care facility operates with the optimal number of residents, the two policies become the same and it is always optimal (and profitable) for the attending physician to start conferences with the residents as soon as there is a patient waiting. We conclude with discussing various extensions of the attending physician and residents model described above. This is joint work with Sigrun Andradottir.

Bio:

Hayriye Ayhan is a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Dr. Ayhan's research interests lie mainly in analysis and control of queueing networks that arise in manufacturing and service systems. She is in particular interested in Markov decision process theory with applications to health care management, systems with flexible servers, and other manufacturing and service operations. She has authored/co-authored numerous refereed journal papers on these topics. Her research has been supported by several National Science Foundation grants including the CAREER Award. She is a member of INFORMS and INFORMS Applied Probability Society for which she serves as the secretary and the treasurer since 1999.