Minimizing operational costs by restructuring the blood sample collection chain

Amir Elalouf; Sharon Hovav; Dmitry Tsadikovich; Liron Yedidsion

doi:10.1016/j.orhc.2015.08.004

Minimizing operational costs by restructuring the blood sample collection chain

Amir Elalouf, Sharon Hovav, Dmitry Tsadikovich, Liron Yedidsion

Department of Management

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

This work focuses on improving the structure of a three-echelon blood sample collection chain operated by a health maintenance organization. The chain comprises clinics, where samples are collected from patients; centrifuge centers, where blood is separated into its components; and a centralized testing laboratory, where samples are analyzed. Under the assumption that some clinics can be provided with in-house centrifugation facilities instead of being assigned to centrifuge centers, a problem is formulated for identifying how many centrifuge centers should be established in order to optimally support the collection process. An exact dynamic programming (DP) algorithm and a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) algorithm are designed to solve this problem.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	81-93
Number of pages	13
Journal	Operations Research for Health Care
Volume	7
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orhc.2015.08.004
State	Published - 1 Dec 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd.

Funding

This research was supported by the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research 2012/135. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the quality of the paper.

Funders	Funder number
Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research	2012/135

Keywords

Blood sample collection
FPTAS
Facility location
Logistics

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10.1016/j.orhc.2015.08.004

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Minimizing operational costs by restructuring the blood sample collection chain

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

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