Resource planning strategies for healthcare systems during a pandemic

Abstract

We study resource planning strategies, including the integrated healthcare resources’ allocation and sharing as well as patients’ transfer, to improve the response of health systems to massive increases in demand during epidemics and pandemics. Our study considers various types of patients and resources to provide access to patient care with minimum capacity extension. Adding new resources takes time that most patients don't have during pandemics. The number of patients requiring scarce healthcare resources is uncertain and dependent on the speed of the pandemic's transmission through a region. We develop a multi-stage stochastic program to optimize various strategies for planning limited and necessary healthcare resources. We simulate uncertain parameters by deploying an agent-based continuous-time stochastic model, and then capture the uncertainty by a forward scenario tree construction approach. Finally, we propose a data-driven rolling horizon procedure to facilitate decision-making in real-time, which mitigates some critical limitations of stochastic programming approaches and makes the resulting strategies implementable in practice. We use two different case studies related to COVID-19 to examine our optimization and simulation tools by extensive computational results. The results highlight these strategies can significantly improve patient access to care during pandemics; their significance will vary under different situations. Our methodology is not limited to the presented setting and can be employed in other service industries where urgent access matters.

Introduction to the special issue on the role of operational research in future epidemics/ pandemics

“…Hospital Resource Planning Strategies: Fattahi et al (2022) study allocating healthcare resources to improve health systems’ response during the COVID-19 pandemic. Resources are categorized into two types in terms of patients’ usage: (1) direct in-use resources that a hospital assigns to a patient during hospitalization (such as ICU beds and ventilators) and (2) other service resources that a hospital utilizes (such as personnel and laboratories).…”

Supply chain planning of vaccine and pharmaceutical clusters under uncertainty: The case of COVID-19

“…Fattahi et al [ 27 ] provided a stochastic programming model to allocate resources to the patients optimally in COVID-19 epidemic conditions. A study was conducted on resource planning strategies that could help health systems effectively manage a surge in demand during epidemics.…”

Designing supply chain strategies against epidemic outbreaks such as COVID‐19: Review and future research directions

“…The third cluster (blue) focuses on pandemics and specifically on the healthcare industry. Many studies have explored different issues in healthcare supply chains during or after a pandemic, such as resilience (Bag et al., 2021; Spiekse et al., 2022), network optimization (Nagurnery, 2021), green supply chain management (Kholaif et al., 2023), resource planning (Fattahi et al., 2023), viability (Alizadeh et al., 2022), and supplier selection (Pamucar et al., 2022).…”