In 2005, 6.5 million children in the United States suffered from asthma, a chronic respiratory disease characterized by periods of difficulty in breathing. Childhood asthma places severe burden on communities through emergency room visits and hospitalization due to lack of access to routine and continuous health care. Non-profit organizations, such as the Mobile C.A.R.E. Foundation (MCF), provide mobile care for childhood asthma through periodic visits to schools in metropolitan areas across the United States. Mobile care entails a complex array of operational decisions, including patient scheduling and capacity allocation, which are critical to ensuring that community health objectives are met effectively. This research investigates the link between operational decisions in a mobile environment and their impact on the community health outcomes. Three critical aspects of the research setting, chronic care, mobile delivery and non-profit environment, necessitate the creation of a new family of operations research models for planning, scheduling and resource allocation in health care operations compared to those developed for conventional settings such as primary care clinics and hospital outpatient departments.
This research will have significant impact at many levels. Operations research techniques can greatly improve the ability of MCF to provide essential health services to children from underserved communities in the Chicago region in a sustainable manner. Such operational improvement is especially critical during an economic downturn. The insights will be used to create a set of operational best practices to be disseminated to other organizations that operate mobile clinics for chronic conditions beyond asthma. The new operations models will contribute to the growing field of health care operations, and stimulate research in settings as varied as mobile health care for diabetes and for homeless and elderly, and mobile HIV clinics in Africa. The research will actively engage graduate and undergraduate students in analytical research and field work.
