Please welcome Dr. Nan Kong from Purdue University. His topic of discussion is how to optimize regional trauma centers.
As always refreshments are available in 428 Daniels Hall 30 minutes before the seminar begins.
Trauma continues to be the leading cause of mortality and morbidity among US citizens younger than 45 years of
age. Literature suggests that geographic mal-distribution of trauma centers correlates with pre-hospital mistriage
errors (both under and over) besides coverage. Under-triage, transporting severely injured patients to a regular
hospital, can lead to various health risks and even mortality. Over-triage, transporting less-severely injured patients to a hospital specializing in trauma care, leads to inappropriate use of trauma care resources, and higher healthcare spending, especially of publically funded patients. Although the government (local or state) has little or no direct authority in promoting the location of trauma centers, they can influence the hospital system(s) who own these centers by offering financial subsidies.
In this talk, we consider the problem of optimizing a regional trauma network that minimizes the negative effects
of UT (to improving social well-being) and OT (to reduce spending) errors in the presence of two decision-makers,
the government and a hospital system. We present a novel bilevel subsidized network redesign problem, in which
the government’s (upper-level) decision is to determine the total subsidy to support social well-being and minimize
public spending; whereas the hospital system’s (lower-level) decision is to upgrade/downgrade facility status to
maximize its revenue. We design a branch-and-bound based algorithm for the resultant bilevel integer programming
model. Further, we add cuts to tighten lower bounds for subproblems whenever applicable. Through comprehensive numerical experiments with randomly generated instances, we are able to show the superiority of our algorithm in
comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms for bilevel integer programming. If time allows, we will present case
studies based on real incidence, geography, and cost data from a Midwest U.S. state.
Professor Nan Kong is Associate Professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University. He is also on the Faculty Advisory Team for Purdue’s Regnestrief Center for Healthcare Engineering. He received his PhD in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2006. His research interest includes healthcare operations management, in particular healthcare network design, provider staff scheduling, and within-network patient flow control. Recently, he has expanded his research to machine learning for biomedicine. He has published close to 50 peer-reviewed journal articles. He is an Associate Editor for the IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering and for the International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. His research has been or currently being funded by the National Science Foundation, National Cancer Institute, Agency for Health Research and Quality, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He is currently President of the Public Sector OR Section in INFORMS and Committee Chair for the
