Emergency department (ED) crowding has been a persistent concern in the U.S. healthcare system. As such, many researchers have studied its effects on outcomes within the ED. We present novel results regarding the impacts of ED crowding on system performance outside the ED, specifically post-ED...

Problem Definition: People often make service quality judgments based on information about the quality of each server even though they care primarily about the quality each customer experiences. When and how do server-level quality metrics differ from customer-experienced ones? Can people...

The rise in online and multichannel retailing has pushed retailers to give increased attention to their order fulfillment operations. We study "chaotic storage" fulfillment systems in which dissimilar items are stored together in a single location. This necessitates a searching task as part of...

Problem Definition: We study the impact of service facility layout on how service workers organize their tasks. We focus on the hospital emergency department (ED) as a service setting where nurses (servers) have discretion over how they interact with their patients (customers) in a facility that...

Objective: To provide a rigorous framework for evaluating a Lean health care program based on an approach developed to evaluate the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) Lean initiative. Design: Data for analysis includes performance metrics for Lean activities, system level performance...

Recent work has established that the gradient of life expectancy with respect to wealth is large and widening. We make three contributions to build on that result using two recent decades of data from the United States. First, the additional years are in healthy, disability-free years,...

Problem Definition: In service operations settings where the difficulty of jobs is unpredictable, workers can encounter critical incidents (CIs)---jobs which are sufficiently disturbing to challenge workers' coping mechanisms. We examine the impact of encountering CIs on subsequent operational...

Improving financial and health literacy is an important step in reducing economic vulnerability in older age, yet the means by which individuals accumulate these types of human capital remains an open question. This paper evaluates the impact of online search activities on the levels of...