Organizing timely treatment in multi-disciplinary care
Ingeborg Bikker is a PhD student in the research group Stochastic Operations Research (SOR). Her supervisors are prof.dr. R.J. Boucherie from the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science and prof.dr. M. van Houdenhoven from the Radboud University Nijmegen / Sint Maartenskliniek.
Healthcare providers experience an increased pressure to organize their processes more efficiently and to provide coordinated care over multiple disciplines. Organizing multi-disciplinary care is typically highly constrained, since multiple appointments per patient have to be scheduled with possible restrictions between them. Furthermore, schedules of professionals from various facilities or with different skills must be aligned.
In this thesis, we use operations research methods to support multi-disciplinary care settings in providing timely treatments with an excellent quality of care, against affordable costs, while taking patient and employee satisfaction into account. We consider settings in rehabilitation care and radiotherapy, which are closely related in terms of underlying planning problems. The developed models are applied to case studies in the Sint Maartenskliniek Nijmegen, the AMC Amsterdam and a BCCA cancer clinic in Vancouver, Canada.
