Mission Statement

Given the size of the healthcare industry, the issues related to cost of medical treatments and quality of delivered care are likely to remain at the forefront of public discourse for the foreseeable future. Management of health care operations designs approaches for achieving operational excellence as one of the important ways of driving down costs of care while maintaining its desired quality. Despite the decades of research on operational aspects of health care delivery, there remains a sizable divide between theoretical developments and practice: many health care organizations remain ridden with inefficiencies, while the existing research does not always provide adequate description of the operational complexities resulting from changing methods of care delivery, as well as payment and incentive schemes.

The Healthcare Operations Department is seeking papers which provide a rigorous methodological treatment of a practically relevant healthcare problem using tools of operations management. On the methodological side, we encourage submissions which meet the high criteria for scholarly work, whether in the analytical or empirical domains. On the practical side, papers should be focused on important managerial issues faced by health care practitioners and administrators. Papers describing innovative applications and case studies will also be welcomed. A list of topics of interest to the Department includes:

• Capacity and demand management
• Workforce and equipment scheduling and planning
• Incentives and performance evaluation
• Clinical diagnosis and decision making
• Disease modeling and prevention
• Treatment design and planning
• Health information systems
• Regional planning and network modeling

Departmental Editor

Professor Sergei Savin
The Wharton School
savin@wharton.upenn.edu

Senior Editors

Robert (Bob) Batt, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rachel Chen, University of California at Davis
K. C. Diwas, Emory University
Craig Froehle, University of Cincinnati
Bruce Golden, University of Maryland
Song-Hee Kim, Seoul National University
Nan Liu, Boston College
Susan Lu, Purdue University
Zhan Pang, Purdue University
Martin Puterman, University of British Columbia
Nicos Savva, London Business School
Andrew J. Schaefer, Rice University
Steven Shechter, University of British Columbia
Vedat Verter, McGill University