We show that review platforms reduce healthcare interruptions for patients looking for a new physician. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy using physician retirements as a 'disruptive shock' that forces patients to find a new physician. We combine insurance claims data with...

Women with certain risk factors such as BRCA 1/2 gene mutations and family history of breast or ovarian cancer are at higher risk for breast cancer. For high-risk women, the existing guidelines suggest intensified screening and the use of ultrasound (US) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to...

Platelets are critical blood products. The management of platelet inventory is particularly challenging due to its perishable nature with a short shelf-life. Motivated by a platelet inventory management problem at a two-location hospital system, we study how the wastage of platelets, and more...

Problem Definition and Relevance: Characterized by time-varying arrivals, multi-stage service, and multi-class patient population, emergency rooms (ERs) are complex healthcare delivery systems, where optimizing the staffing levels of physicians is a challenge. In collaboration with Mayo Clinic,...

Capitation payment models have been increasingly adopted by the payers in the U.S. healthcare market during the past decade. However, healthcare services provided in Medicare Advantage (MA), the largest capitation program in the U.S., have been suggested to be more appealing to healthier...

Due to the importance, limited supply and perishable nature of blood products, effective management of blood collection is critical for high quality healthcare delivery. In this paper, working closely with the American Red Cross (ARC), we study a blood collection problem focusing on whole blood...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common type of liver cancer and the fastest-growing cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. Most HCC cases are attributed to chronic hepatitis C virus infection, which affects nearly 3 million Americans and 170 million globally. Although...

Motivated by a platelet inventory management problem, we study periodic-review, fixed-lifetime perishable inventory systems where demand is a general stochastic process. The optimal solution for this problem is computationally intractable due to the “curse of dimensionality”. In this paper,...

Early empirical evidence indicates that Medicare Advantage (MA), the largest capitation payment program in the U.S. healthcare market, unintentionally incentivizes health plans to cherry pick profitable patient types, which is referred to as "risk selection". Motivated by this observation, we...