报告人：Nan Kong, Assistant Professor, Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University  
 
报告题目：Determining The Optimal Locations To Schedule Outpatient Specialty Visits Within A Fully Defined Catchment Area  
 
时间：2008年1月3日（星期四）下午2: 00 - 3: 00  
 
地点：工业工程系会议室，舜德楼北510   
 
参加人员：欢迎感兴趣的老师准时参加。另：报告之后他会和学生有一个交流，也请关若曦和陈昌荣通知感兴趣的同学参加。  
 
报告摘要：

Currently, almost all U.S. Veterans’ hospital networks provide outpatient specialty services using the primary medical facility and several satellite outpatient clinics. This practice results in huge travel burden to outpatients. In fact, many outpatient consult requests could be scheduled at closer clinics. So far, almost all effort has been devoted to centralized outpatient scheduling, whereas little consideration is given to conceptualize distributed spatial scheduling to minimize travel burden.

In this talk, we develop resource allocation models to analyze the optimal visit sites based on the satisfied patient demand. We compare the current practice and the proposed innovative care delivery approach via a simulation-optimization approach. Using the simplest configuration, our model yields significant improvement both in terms of average travel distance and average travel time. We also present a stochastic programming model to address patient request uncertainty in scheduling.  

Our analyses show that the current practice can be improved by scheduling physicians in a distributed fashion for outpatient specialty visits. For further empirical analysis, our model can be populated with any existing or proposed demand and demographics. This model is useful for validating the suitability of iterative patient and site scheduling. It is also useful for later site selection of new clinical facilities.

At the end of the talk, I will briefly overview the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering, and healthcare systems engineering research at Purdue.      
 
报告人简介：

 Nan Kong is an Assistant Professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University. He joined Purdue BME in August, 2007. Prior to the appointment at Purdue, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include health systems engineering, data-driven modeling in medical decision making, stochastic optimization, and computational discrete optimization. He received an Honorable Mention for the Dantzig Doctoral Dissertation Award given by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the 1st Place for the Pritzker Doctoral Dissertation Award given by the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE).