In mental healthcare, timely access to treatment is under pressure. A key explaining factor is the lack of alignment between required treatment and available resources causing many patients to be put on waiting lists. A second explaining factor is the imbalance between standardization and personalization of treatment pathways. A third factor is imprecise decision-making during the diagnostic phase. Treatment capacity used without meeting the treatment needs is a further loss of scarce resources
. An approach that enables timely access to treatment by aligning treatment needs and capacity is needed.
Integral Capacity Management (ICM) has proven effective in improving treatment accessibility as well as reducing work pressure in hospital care. ICM within mental healthcare faces unique challenges due to, e.g., the multidisciplinary nature of treatments and the variable definitions of treatment success/completion. This project aims to extend results for hospital care to mental healthcare to develop an integrated ICM approach to improve timely access to treatment and increase resource utilization across mental healthcare chains.
You will develop operations research models and data-driven decision rules for improving treatment accessibility as well as reducing work pressure in mental healthcare. Such models may, for example, be composed of statistical techniques to forecast the of number patients, stochastic models to determine the waiting times of patients, and optimisation models such as reinforcement learning models to allocate patients to treatment.
You will implement your decision rules in prototype decision support systems to facilitate their further development towards real-life use in mental healthcare organisations.
Your project will be embedded in the inter-faculty research team
CHOIR (Centre for Healthcare Operations Improvement and Research). CHOIR is a research center within the UT that focuses on Operations Research methods for Healthcare Logistics, such as multi-appointment scheduling, surgery scheduling, and resource allocation in times of scarce healthcare capacity. CHOIR is one of the most active and productive research groups in the field of Operations Research and Management in Healthcare.