In this talk I will present an overview of my research on chronic care services. I will then focus on the problem of care delivery for complex patients, with multiple comorbidities. In this project, we develop a Markov Decision Process framework to manage care for individual patients with multiple chronic conditions through a complex care hub. Complex care provision influences the evolution of Patient Activation Measure (PAM), an indicator for healthy behavior, which affects the evolution of health state of patients. We first define a general model where the transition probabilities and the rewards are time dependent parameters. Then, we explore optimal and heuristic policies which maximize the welfare for the case of stationary parameters. Through numerical experiments we explore the performance of policies that focus on managing more complex patients or improving activation of all patients. We explore models with alternative formulations and discuss the implications.
[joint work with Odysseas Kanavetas, Lerzan Ormeci and Christos Vasilakis]
Biographical Sketch
Evrim Didem Güneş is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey, and she is currently visiting McGill University Desautels Faculty of Management, Operations Management Department. She holds BS and MS degrees in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey, and a PhD degree in Operations Management from INSEAD, France. Her research interests are focused on healthcare operations management and behavioral operations management. She serves as an Area Editor for the journal Health Systems, and on the editorial board of Health Care Management Science.
*Light refreshments will be served at 12pm