Many public and private healthcare payers use formularies as a tool for controlling drug costs and quality. Although the price per dose is often negotiated as part of the formulary listing, payers may still face unlimited financial risk if demand is much greater than expected at the time of...

In this paper, we address the problem of parallel batching of jobs on identical machines to minimize makespan. The problem is motivated from the washing step of hospital sterilization services where jobs have different sizes, different release dates and equal processing times. Machines can...

Although physical activity has been considered as an important modifiable risk factor for obesity, the empirical evidence on the relationship between physical activity and obesity is mixed. Observational studies in the public health literature fail to account for time-invariant unobserved...

Limited use conditions (LUCs) are a method of directing treatment with new drugs to those populations where they will be most cost effective. In this paper we investigate how a drug manufacturer could determine pricing and LUCs to maximize profits. We assume that the payer makes formulary...

We assess the cost-effectiveness of maintenance treatment for heroin addiction, with emphasis on its role in preventing HIV infection. The analysis is based on a dynamic compartmental model of the HIV epidemic among a population of adults, ages 18 to 44. The population is divided into nine...

Each year, a small number of expectant mothers with high-risk pregnancies in British Columbia (BC) are sent to the United States (US) because of a lack of neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) beds. We developed a discrete-event simulation model to determine the impact of changing the number of...

Lease expiration management (LEM) in the apartment industry aims to control the number of lease expirations and thus achieve maximal revenue growth. We examine rental rate strategies in the context of LEM for apartment buildings that offer a single lease term and face demand uncertainty. We show...