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Operations research for resource planning and -use in radiotherapy: a literature review
- Source :
- BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, BMC medical informatics and decision making, 16:149. BioMed Central
- Publication Year :
- 2016
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2016.
-
Abstract
- Background The delivery of radiotherapy (RT) involves the use of rather expensive resources and multi-disciplinary staff. As the number of cancer patients receiving RT increases, timely delivery becomes increasingly difficult due to the complexities related to, among others, variable patient inflow, complex patient routing, and the joint planning of multiple resources. Operations research (OR) methods have been successfully applied to solve many logistics problems through the development of advanced analytical models for improved decision making. This paper presents the state of the art in the application of OR methods for logistics optimization in RT, at various managerial levels. Methods A literature search was performed in six databases covering several disciplines, from the medical to the technical field. Papers included in the review were published in peer-reviewed journals from 2000 to 2015. Data extraction includes the subject of research, the OR methods used in the study, the extent of implementation according to a six-stage model and the (potential) impact of the results in practice. Results From the 33 papers included in the review, 18 addressed problems related to patient scheduling (of which 12 focus on scheduling patients on linear accelerators), 8 focus on strategic decision making, 5 on resource capacity planning, and 2 on patient prioritization. Although calculating promising results, none of the papers reported a full implementation of the model with at least a thorough pre-post performance evaluation, indicating that, apart from possible reporting bias, implementation rates of OR models in RT are probably low. Conclusions The literature on OR applications in RT covers a wide range of approaches from strategic capacity management to operational scheduling levels, and shows that considerable benefits in terms of both waiting times and resource utilization are likely to be achieved. Various fields can be further developed, for instance optimizing the coordination between the available capacity of different imaging devices or developing scheduling models that consider the RT chain of operations as a whole rather than the treatment machines alone. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12911-016-0390-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
- Subjects :
- Cancer Research
Operations research
Computer science
medicine.medical_treatment
Resource planning
Logistics optimization
Operations improvement
0211 other engineering and technologies
Health Informatics
02 engineering and technology
Health informatics
Field (computer science)
030218 nuclear medicine & medical imaging
Scheduling (computing)
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Resource (project management)
Capacity planning
medicine
Humans
Operations management
Literature review
021103 operations research
Radiotherapy
business.industry
Health Policy
Health services research
Capacity management
Computer Science Applications
Radiation therapy
Oncology
Data extraction
Health Services Research
business
Research Article
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14726947
- Volume :
- 16
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....1f5658499584bdf39bda2715abcf169a