David is a healthcare administration leader who manages the operations of a long-term care facility. Within the past 6 months, long-term care patients and residents have experienced an increased number of hospital readmissions due to ongoing acute infections. In striving to ensure effective healthcare delivery and patient safety, David is seeking to use optimization as an analytic technique to determine how to best implement workflow processes to have clinical staff and physicians dedicate time to routine history and full-body observation to help prevent ongoing acute infections.
For this Discussion, reflect on how optimization techniques might enhance healthcare delivery. Consider the value of optimization techniques in assisting healthcare administration leaders in providing quality patient care and safety.
Post a description of some problems that might lend themselves to optimization in your health services organization or one with which you are familiar, and explain why. Then, set up a fictitious optimization problem that would save one of the problems (e.g., Max z = a1x1 + a2x2, subject to constraints). Be specific, and provide examples.