Healthcare Operations Research Excellence LAB

Healthcare Operations Management Excellence Lab (HOME)

🏠 About

Healthcare systems operate under profound uncertainty—emergency calls arrive without warning, surgery durations defy prediction, and critical resources are perpetually scarce. Our lab study these challenges through the lens of Operations Management: how should limited resources be allocated, sequenced, and dispatched in real time to maximize patient survival and system efficiency?

Our research spans the full continuum of care—from pre-hospital emergency response (ambulance dispatching, AED placement, community CPR networks) to in-hospital operations (surgery scheduling, operating room coordination, patient flow).

🔬 Research Areas

1. 🚑 Emergency Medical Services (EMS) & Pre-Hospital Care Operations

The first minutes of a medical emergency determine survival. Working closely with EMS agency partners, we study the operational design of pre-hospital care systems:

• AED Network Design & CPR Responder Allocation: Where should Automated External Defibrillators be placed, and how should community first-responders be mobilized, to maximize out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) survival rates?
• System-Level Resilience: How do EMS networks absorb demand surges (mass-casualty events, pandemics) without catastrophic degradation in service?

2. 🏥 Surgery Scheduling & Operating Room Management

Operating rooms are the most resource-intensive and disruption-prone units in any hospital. In collaboration with hospital partners, we develop intelligent scheduling systems that adapt to real-time operational events:

• LLM-Driven Event-Based Surgery Scheduling: We are pioneering the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret and respond to real-time surgical events—emergency add-ons, duration overruns, equipment failures, and staff unavailability—translating complex, evolving constraints into actionable schedule adjustments through natural-language reasoning.

  📄 Yifan Bao, Lei Liu, Zhen Tan, Chandra Irawan. (2026). An LLM-based framework for event-driven operating room scheduling. International Journal of Production Research. 🔗 DOI Link ·

• Multi-Resource Coordination: Joint scheduling of surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, rooms, and post-operative beds under uncertainty.

3. 📐 Stochastic Scheduling Theory

Our healthcare applications are built on a deep methodological foundation in stochastic scheduling. The canonical problem we study is the Flow Shop Scheduling Problem under general random processing times:

• For $m \geq 3$ machines and general distributions, no exact method previously existed to evaluate or optimize job permutations. We embed the flow shop in a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) whose states track the phase of every active job, yielding the first exact evaluation method for any fixed sequence under Phase-Type (PH) distributions.
• These exact solutions provide zero-variance analytical rewards for reinforcement learning agents (PPO/Transformer), creating a novel Analytical Reward RL framework that searches the combinatorial space with mathematical precision rather than noisy simulation estimates.

🤝 Partners

We are grateful to collaborate with:

• Ningbo Emergency Center — Pre-hospital emergency response operations
• Ningbo First Hospital — Surgery scheduling, OR management, patient flow
• Alibaba – OM for good society
• Qiuga Neighborhood – OM for the Neighborhood goods

👥 People

“I am fortunate to work with many talented and diligent students, and I am deeply committed to supporting their academic and professional growth.”

Current Students & Researchers

Alumni & Past Members