ACCESD Healthcare

What We Do

Healthcare operations management (OM) is a field of research that focuses on mathematical techniques to address inefficiencies in healthcare service delivery that may cause unnecessary waiting. Healthcare OM has been used to improve access to healthcare in many countries around the world.  Application areas of healthcare OM include strategic planning (location of units within new facilities, sizing of inpatient units, determining optimal clinic patient panel size), scheduling (surgical OR, nursing staff, diagnostic units), and patient flow (within emergency departments and appointment systems).

With the increasing amount of healthcare service delivery research going on across the University of Calgary—including projects to improve access to emergency care, acute stroke care, hip and knee replacement surgery, and care for rheumatoid arthritis—the need for a cross-campus platform for collaboration has become clear.  ACCESD Healthcare was started in September 2017 and is building on existing strong relationships to provide a platform for continued high-quality research.

ACCESD Healthcare is the successor to HOPE, the Healthcare OPerations Excellence Laboratory, which started at the University of Calgary in the late 1990s as an informal collaboration between members of the Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) area at the Haskayne School of Business and members of the Manufacturing Engineering program within the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering.

Members of HOPE, including Paul Rogers of Manufacturing Engineering and Thomas Rohleder and Diane Bischak of OSCM, worked closely with a number of healthcare professionals to address problems of access to health services by applying tools from the fields of operational research and analytics. These studies resulted in publications addressing challenges in locating patient service centres for Calgary Laboratory Services (Rohleder, Bischak, & Baskin, 2007), reducing long waits for service at the Foothills Hospital Cast Clinic (Rohleder et al., 2011), and improving access to testing for pulmonary function and sleep-related conditions (Pendharkar et al., 2015, 2016; Ip et al., 2016). In a major study, HOPE was commissioned by the Health Quality Council of Alberta (HQCA) to apply discrete-event simulation modelling and system dynamics modelling.