Central European Journal of Operations Research最新文献

Home health care (HHC) services are of vital importance for the health care system of many countries. Further increases in their demand must be expected and with it grows the need to sustain these services in times of disasters. Existing risk assessment tools and guides support HHC service providers to secure their services. However, they do not provide insights on interdependencies of complex systems like HHC. Causal-Loop-Diagrams (CLDs) are generated to visualize the impacts of epidemics, blackouts, heatwaves, and floods on the HHC system. CLDs help to understand the system design as well as cascading effects. Additionally, they simplify the process of identifying points of action in order to mitigate the impacts of disasters. In a case study, the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on HHC in Austria in spring 2020 are shown. A decision support system (DSS) to support the daily scheduling of HHC nurses is presented and applied to numerically analyze the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, using real-world data from a HHC service provider in Vienna. The DSS is based on a Tabu Search metaheuristic that specifically aims to deal with the peculiarities of urban regions. Various transport modes are considered, including time-dependent public transport.

We investigated the benefit of a 6-week ambulant psychiatric rehabilitation program in an ambulant psychiatric rehabilitation clinic in Vienna, Austria, from January 2014 to December 2016 by an uncontrolled repeated measures study. The potential of this intervention program was assessed by effectiveness and cost measures using suitable statistical analyses. We compared the effectiveness and cost measures of this ambulant psychiatric rehabilitation program on patients for the period of up to 12 months after discharge to the period of 12 months before admission to the intervention program based on self-reported catamnesis questionnaires. For the program's effectiveness measures, we accounted for both psychological indices for measuring depression severity, symptom burden, and functioning to document the health improvement of patients and economy-related indices such as the number of sick leave days for patients. For the program's cost measures, both direct tangible treatment and medication costs and indirect tangible costs based on the productivity loss measured in non-working days of the patients were considered. The results significantly demonstrated that all psychological effectiveness measures for the patients highly improved by the 6-weeks rehabilitation program and remained rather stable 12 months after discharge. We found that costs for the 6-week ambulant psychiatric rehabilitation program could be easily covered within 12 months after discharge once a total societal cost perspective was considered. Even additional total cost savings of up to over 5000 Euro could be achieved which were highest for employed patients, followed by unemployed patients receiving rehabilitation allowance due to both their high direct medication and treatment costs as well as high indirect costs for productivity loss. The most important finding was that this treatment program was especially beneficial for rehabilitation patients in earlier stages of psychiatric diseases who were still employed, indicating the need for early intervention in mental disorder.

This articles provides a short summary of the research topics and latest research results of the European Working Group "Operations Research Applied to Health Services" (ORAHS) organized as an e-conference in Juli 2020 at the University of Vienna, Austria (https://orahs2020.univie.ac.at/). Furthermore, challenges for OR in health care including application areas, decision support systems, general trends, and modelling techniques are briefly illustrated from an European and international perspective by providing selected essential literature reviews.