Annual influenza outbreaks incur great expenses in both human and monetary terms, and billions of dollars are being allocated for influenza pandemic preparedness in an attempt to avert even greater potential losses. Vaccination is a primary weapon for fighting influenza outbreaks. The influenza...

We propose and analyze robust optimization models of an inventory management problem, where cumulative purchase, inventory and shortage costs over n periods are minimized for correlated non-identically distributed demand. We assume that the means and covariance matrix of stochastic demand are...

Problem Definition: Healthcare industry is in dire need of operational improvements to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. Using observational data from an outpatient clinic, we study the impact of introducing capacity flexibility (via exam room design) on the efficiency of care provision,...

Gray markets, also known as parallel imports, are marketplaces for trading genuine products that are diverted from authorized distribution channels. They have created fierce competition for manufacturers in many industries and each year billions of dollars worth of products are traded in these...

The traditional payment system between an insurer and providers does not incentivize providers to limit their prices nor patients to choose less expensive providers, hence contributing to high insurer expenditures. Reference pricing has been proposed as a way to better align incentives and...

Multiple myeloma is an incurable cancer of bone marrow plasma cells with a median overall survival of 5 years. With newly approved drugs to treat this disease over the last decade, physicians are afforded more opportunities to tailor treatment to individual patients and thereby improve survival...

Healthcare reimbursements in the US have been traditionally based upon a fee-for-service (FFS) scheme, providing incentives for high volume of care, rather than efficient care. The new healthcare legislation tests new payment models that remove such incentives, such as the bundled payment (BP)...

Governments across the world constantly use a variety of measures to contain drug costs in order to increase patient access to critical medications. External Reference Pricing (ERP), or international price comparison, is a commonly employed policy to control prices of pharmaceuticals. ERP uses...

Auto-delivery is a subscription model widely employed in supply chains, whereby a supplier delivers products to a buyer (or multiple buyers) according to the buyer's choice of a constant shipping quantity to be delivered at prescheduled dates. The buyer enjoys a discount for the auto-delivery...

Cloud computing has been recognized as a critical driver of Information-Technology (IT) enabled innovations. In this paper, we review recent cloud computing research from an Operations Management (OM) perspective, by focusing on major operations challenges faced by a cloud provider in three...