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This book presents a collection of concrete applications to situations detailing the problem areas of making difficult decisions in the health care field. It examines the methodology employed in making these decisions, the implementation and results.

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The most difficult part of making decisions in the health care field on all levels (national, regional, institutional, patient) is linked to the very complexity of the system itself, to the intrinsic uncertainty involved and its dynamic nature. This requires not only the ability to analyze and interpret a large amount of information but also arrange it so that it becomes a cognitive base for appropriate decision-making. Moreover, decisions in the health care field are subjected to many challenges and constraints: fast change and uncertain outcomes, aging population, increasing citizen expectations, equity considerations and limited resources. Operations research, statistical and economic-related quantitative methods supply these decisions making tools and methodology.
The contributed book presents a collection of applications to concrete situations detailing the problem area, the methodology employed, the implementation and results. Each topic addressed in the book will be structured in such a way that an interdisciplinary and wide audience will be able to use the materials presented.
As an example the book chapters will address health policies issues, planning health services, epidemiology and disease modelling, home-care modelling, logistics in health care, capacity planning, quality and appropriateness.

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Workforce Management based on forecasted demand. Operating rooms scheduling under uncertainty. Idealised design and modelling of alternatives to hospital care. A coordination model for enhancing research on rare diseases. Integrating simulation and risk-based sensitivity analysis methods in hospital emergency department design. Technical and scale efficiencies of Catholic hospitals: Does a system value of stewardship matter? Optimal allocation of urban nuclei to hospital birth centres in a geographical region. The nurse-to-patient assigment problem in Home Care services. An analysis of the financial statements of Italian health care providers through correlation-based networks. Prioritizing health care interventions: A multicriteria resource allocation model to inform the choice of community care programmes. Using data envelopment analysis for formative evaluation of radiotherapy services: An exploratory study. A simulation-based decision support tool to analyze clinical pathways in hospital. Patient mix optimisation for inpatient planning with multiple resources.

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