From Data to Decision Making in Health and Humanitarian Logistics: Insights and Challenges
April 11 @ 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Decision making to satisfy the basic human needs of health, food, and education is complex. We present an overview of two illustrative studies using data to inform decision making in health care delivery associated with sepsis and hunger relief.
In the first study, we integrate electronic health record (EHR) data with clinical expertise to develop a continuous-time Markov decision process model of the natural history of sepsis. We formulate this as a stopping problem to find the optimal first intervention to minimize expected mortality and morbidity. We explore the effect of the complex trade-offs associated with the intervention costs and patient disposition costs which are subjective and difficult to estimate. This framework provides key insights into sepsis patients’ stochastic trajectories and informs clinical decision making associated with caring for these patients as their health dynamically evolves.
In the second study, we develop a single-period, weighted multi-criteria optimization model that provides the decision-maker the flexibility to capture their preferences over the three criteria of equity, effectiveness, and efficiency, and explore the resulting trade-offs. We introduce a novel algorithm to elicit the inherent preference of a food bank by analyzing its actions within a single-period. The non-interactive nature of this algorithm is especially significant for humanitarian organizations such as food banks which lack the resources to interact with modelers on a regular basis. We explore the implications of different decision-maker preferences for the criteria on distribution policies.
Bio: Julie Simmons Ivy, Ph.D., is the Vivian L. Carpenter Collegiate Professor and Chair of the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) at the University of Michigan. Dr. Ivy is also the Edgar S. Woolard Professor Emerita of the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University. Dr. Ivy received her B.S. and Ph.D. from Michigan IOE and her M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech. Dr. Ivy’s research seeks to model complex interactions and quantitatively capture the impact of different factors, objectives, system dynamics, intervention options and policies on outcomes to address complex societal issues in healthcare and hunger relief. Dr. Ivy is an Institute of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) Fellow and an Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE) Fellow. Dr. Ivy serves on the National Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics (BMSA). Dr. Ivy has focused on empowering women of color and underrepresented minorities in IE, OR, and STEM over the past 25+ years. She was selected as an INFORMS 2021 Minority Issues Forum (MIF) Fellow and received the INFORMS 2020 WORMS Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS.
