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Shoaib M, Mustafee N, Madan K, Ramamohan V. Leveraging multi-tier healthcare facility network simulations for capacity planning in a pandemic. Socioecon Plann Sci 2023; 88:101660. [PMID: 38620120 PMCID: PMC10290165 DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2023.101660] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2023] [Revised: 05/29/2023] [Accepted: 06/19/2023] [Indexed: 04/17/2024]
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed severe demands on healthcare facilities across the world, and in several countries, makeshift COVID-19 centres have been operationalised to handle patient overflow. In developing countries such as India, the public healthcare system (PHS) is organised as a hierarchical network with patient flows from lower-tier primary health centres (PHC) to mid-tier community health centres (CHC) and downstream to district hospitals (DH). In this study, we demonstrate how a network-based modelling and simulation approach utilising generic modelling principles can (a) quantify the extent to which the existing facilities in the PHS can effectively cope with the forecasted COVID-19 caseload; and (b) inform decisions on capacity at makeshift COVID-19 Care Centres (CCC) to handle patient overflows. We apply the approach to an empirical study of a local PHS comprising ten PHCs, three CHCs, one DH and one makeshift CCC. Our work demonstrates how the generic modelling approach finds extensive use in the development of simulations of multi-tier facility networks that may contain multiple instances of generic simulation models of facilities at each network tier. Further, our work demonstrates how multi-tier healthcare facility network simulations can be leveraged for capacity planning in health crises.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mohd Shoaib
- Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110016, India
| | - Navonil Mustafee
- Centre for Simulation, Analytics and Modelling, University of Exeter, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4ST, UK
| | - Karan Madan
- Department of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi 110029, India
| | - Varun Ramamohan
- Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110016, India
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2
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Kochakkashani F, Kayvanfar V, Haji A. Supply chain planning of vaccine and pharmaceutical clusters under uncertainty: The case of COVID-19. Socioecon Plann Sci 2023; 87:101602. [PMID: 37255585 PMCID: PMC10111859 DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2023.101602] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/24/2022] [Revised: 04/17/2023] [Accepted: 04/17/2023] [Indexed: 06/01/2023]
Abstract
As an abrupt epidemic occurs, healthcare systems are shocked by the surge in the number of susceptible patients' demands, and decision-makers mostly rely on their frame of reference for urgent decision-making. Many reports have declared the COVID-19 impediments to trading and global economic growth. This study aims to provide a mathematical model to support pharmaceutical supply chain planning during the COVID-19 epidemic. Additionally, it aims to offer new insights into hospital supply chain problems by unifying cold and non-cold chains and considering a wide range of pharmaceuticals and vaccines. This approach is unprecedented and includes an analysis of various pharmaceutical features such as temperature, shelf life, priority, and clustering. To propose a model for planning the pharmaceutical supply chains, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is used for a four-echelon supply chain design. This model aims to minimize the costs involved in the pharmaceutical supply chain by maintaining an acceptable service level. Also, this paper considers uncertainty as an intrinsic part of the problem and addresses it through the wait-and-see method. Furthermore, an unexplored unsupervised learning method in the realm of supply chain planning has been used to cluster the pharmaceuticals and the vaccines and its merits and drawbacks are proposed. A case of Tehran hospitals with real data has been used to show the model's capabilities, as well. Based on the obtained results, the proposed approach is able to reach the optimum service level in the COVID conditions while maintaining a reduced cost. The experiment illustrates that the hospitals' adjacency and emergency orders alleviated the service level significantly. The proposed MILP model has proven to be efficient in providing a practical intuition for decision-makers. The clustering technique reduced the size of the problem and the time required to solve the model considerably.
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Affiliation(s)
- Farid Kochakkashani
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Washington University, Washington D.C, USA
| | - Vahid Kayvanfar
- Division of Engineering Management and Decision Sciences, College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar
| | - Alireza Haji
- Department of Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
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Hosseini-Motlagh SM, Samani MRG, Karimi B. Resilient and social health service network design to reduce the effect of COVID-19 outbreak. Ann Oper Res 2023; 328:1-73. [PMID: 37361086 PMCID: PMC10169215 DOI: 10.1007/s10479-023-05363-w] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 04/17/2023] [Indexed: 06/28/2023]
Abstract
With the severe outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), researchers are motivated to develop efficient methods to face related issues. The present study aims to design a resilient health system to offer medical services to COVID-19 patients and prevent further disease outbreaks by social distancing, resiliency, cost, and commuting distance as decisive factors. It incorporated three novel resiliency measures (i.e., health facility criticality, patient dissatisfaction level, and dispersion of suspicious people) to promote the designed health network against potential infectious disease threats. Also, it introduced a novel hybrid uncertainty programming to resolve a mixed degree of the inherent uncertainty in the multi-objective problem, and it adopted an interactive fuzzy approach to address it. The actual data obtained from a case study in Tehran province in Iran proved the strong performance of the presented model. The findings show that the optimum use of medical centers' potential and the corresponding decisions result in a more resilient health system and cost reduction. A further outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is also prevented by shortening the commuting distance for patients and avoiding the increasing congestion in the medical centers. Also, the managerial insights show that establishing and evenly distributing camps and quarantine stations within the community and designing an efficient network for patients with different symptoms result in the optimum use of the potential capacity of medical centers and a decrease in the rate of bed shortage in the hospitals. Another insight drawn is that an efficient allocation of the suspect and definite cases to the nearest screening and care centers makes it possible to prevent the disease carriers from commuting within the community and increase the coronavirus transmission rate.
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Affiliation(s)
- Seyyed-Mahdi Hosseini-Motlagh
- School of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, University Ave, Narmak, Tehran, 16846 Iran
| | - Mohammad Reza Ghatreh Samani
- School of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, University Ave, Narmak, Tehran, 16846 Iran
| | - Behnam Karimi
- School of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, University Ave, Narmak, Tehran, 16846 Iran
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Ravichandran M, Vimal KEK, Kumar V, Kulkarni O, Govindaswamy S, Kandasamy J. Environment and economic analysis of reverse supply chain scenarios for remanufacturing using discrete-event simulation approach. Environ Dev Sustain 2023:1-42. [PMID: 37363015 PMCID: PMC10032250 DOI: 10.1007/s10668-023-03141-z] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/25/2022] [Accepted: 03/09/2023] [Indexed: 06/28/2023]
Abstract
The study covers the concepts involved in reverse supply chain modeling using the case of a manufacturing company. The purpose of this study is to build a sustainable reverse supply chain model for resource conservation through remanufacturing of stator shafts by using a discrete-event simulation approach. The simulation studies in the reverse supply chain have taken up cases of either plastic or electronic waste remanufacturing, while very limited studies deal with simulation of sustainable reverse supply chains using a manufacturing industry case study from international customers. In this study, reverse supply chain using simulation study in manufacturing sector is carried out using Arena Rockwell simulation software. The simulation model is built using discrete-event simulation for returns from customers of two developed countries, i.e., Germany and the USA to Chennai, India. The study emphasizes full container load and less than container load modes of shipment scenarios and multiple return cases. The comparative analysis suggests that the value-added and non-value-added time of the reverse supply chain is slightly greater in the less container load scenario. The wait time per entity in remanufacturing processes similar for both shipment scenarios varies significantly based on return cases. The cost and carbon emission associated with transportation, in the reverse supply chain inclusive of social carbon cost, have also been estimated. Therefore, the study proposes a possible sustainable reverse supply chain framework that could be adopted by different manufacturing industries and yield opportunities for performance improvement.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mahadharsan Ravichandran
- School of Mechanical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu 632 014 India
| | - K. E. K. Vimal
- Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu 620015 India
| | - Vikas Kumar
- Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK
- Department of Management Studies, Graphic Era Deemed to be University, Dehradun, India
- Adjunct Faculty, Woxsen School of Business, Woxsen University, Hyderabad, India
| | - Onkar Kulkarni
- School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
| | - Sundaramali Govindaswamy
- School of Mechanical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu 632 014 India
| | - Jayakrishna Kandasamy
- School of Mechanical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu 632 014 India
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Al-Bazi A, Madi F, Monshar AA, Eliya Y, Adediran T, Khudir KA. Modelling the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 exposure in closed-environments using agent-based modelling. International Journal of Healthcare Management 2023. [DOI: 10.1080/20479700.2023.2189555] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/17/2023]
Affiliation(s)
- Ammar Al-Bazi
- Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
| | - Faris Madi
- Faculty of Engineering, Environment and Computing, Coventry University, Coventry, UK
| | | | - Yousif Eliya
- Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence & Impact, Health Sciences Centre, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
| | - Tunde Adediran
- Faculty of Engineering, Environment and Computing, Coventry University, Coventry, UK
| | - Khaled Al Khudir
- Faculty of Engineering, Environment and Computing, Coventry University, Coventry, UK
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Chen TCT, Chiu MC. Evaluating the sustainability of smart technology applications in healthcare after the COVID-19 pandemic: A hybridising subjective and objective fuzzy group decision-making approach with explainable artificial intelligence. Digit Health 2022; 8:20552076221136381. [PMID: 36386245 PMCID: PMC9647303 DOI: 10.1177/20552076221136381] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/01/2022] [Accepted: 10/14/2022] [Indexed: 09/30/2023] Open
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some smart technology applications were more effective than had been expected, whereas some others did not achieve satisfactory performance. Consequently, whether smart technology applications in healthcare are sustainable is a question that warrants investigation. To address this question, a hybridising subjective and objective fuzzy group decision-making approach with explainable artificial intelligence was proposed in this study and then used to evaluate the sustainability of smart technology applications in healthcare. The contribution of this research is its subjective evaluation of the sustainability of smart technology applications followed by correction of the evaluation outcome on the basis of the applications' objective performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, a fuzzy nonlinear programming model was formulated and optimised. In addition, the impact of several major global events that occurred during the pandemic on the sustainability of smart technology applications was considered. The proposed methodology was applied to evaluate the sustainability levels of eight smart technology applications in healthcare. According to the experimental results, three applications-namely healthcare apps, smartwatches, and remote temperature scanners-are expected to be highly sustainable in healthcare, whereas one application, namely smart clothing, is not.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tin-Chih Toly Chen
- Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung
University, Hsinchu
| | - Min-Chi Chiu
- Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chin-Yi University of
Technology, Taichung
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