Health Care Operations Research

Health care is Canada's largest industry with annual expenditures exceeding $130 billion. The Canadian healthcare system is at a critical point; it faces an aging population, attrition in its workforce and pressure to adopt new, costly technologies. Further, long wait times for health care services have become one of the paramount issues facing Canadians. To meet these challenges, health system leaders and managers require analytical models to help improve system efficiency and make capacity investments decisions. To this end, this project team seeks to develop and apply operations research methods to improve the management of health care systems. In the past year, the project team has been strengthened by the addition of new members at McGill and the University of Ottawa. Team research has positively impacted surgical scheduling practices at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria and the operation of the ambulatory care unit at the BC Cancer Agency. In addition to publishing results in peer reviewed journals, the team’s results have also frequently been presented to managers in the health care system.