INFORMS: What inspired you to research this particular topic?

SALTZMAN: My colleague Theresa Roeder introduced me to the amazing Judith Lambton, a University of San Francisco nursing professor who’d spent many years earlier in her career as bed allocator at a large urban children’s hospital—a highly complex and stressful job. As Judith was nearing retirement, we were anxious to capture some of her vast knowledge of the bed allocation and patient treatment processes and see if these processes could be tweaked in ways that would allow the hospital to treat more pediatric patients.

INFORMS: Did any of your results surprise you?

SALTZMAN: We were a bit surprised that getting pediatric patients out of their in-patient beds just a few hours earlier than is typical and moving them to a supervised discharge holding area (DHA) could make a practical difference in the total number of patients treated over the course of a year, thereby generating sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile to implement a DHA.

INFORMS: What is the most important take-away you hope readers will learn from your paper?

SALTZMAN: The most important take-away is that an interdisciplinary team of healthcare and O.R. professionals can learn a great deal from one another, and then propose and test specific, sensible ways to improve patient flow. Things that are readily apparent to one group of professionals may not be so to the other. In general, an interdisciplinary approach is a great way to tackle complex problems in many different fields.

INFORMS: Tell us about the process of writing this paper.

SALTZMAN: The process began back in fall of 2013 when I first met Judith. (Theresa had already been working with Judith on another project.) Brian Frost provided us with six years of patient arrival data and we spent several months trying to make sense of it, e.g., determining the major patient types, their arrival patterns, how patient characteristics differed by age, etc. Theresa and I spent several more months picking Judith’s brain, trying to better understand the bed allocation process and how pediatric patients moved around within a unit. We concluded that a detailed, animated simulation model of pediatric patient flow would allow us to study a variety of possible interventions, and we started to build the model. Each time the model significantly changed, we’d show the animated portion of it to Judith who provided feedback and a degree of validation for the model. Interestingly, the hospital under study had previously considered using a DHA but never implemented one because they couldn’t clearly see the benefit. We realized that our model could address precisely this issue and wrote the paper about it.

INFORMS: Why was it important for you to publish in Service Science?

SALTZMAN: The mission and audience of Service Science seemed just right for this paper, which is a detailed yet practical cross-disciplinary study of a complex service system. We think our paper’s findings could be applied to other pediatric hospitals around the country, some administrators of which we hope might be reading Service Science.

INFORMS: Tell us a little about what you are working on now.

SALTZMAN: I’m currently working on an Excel-based system to generate efficient delivery routes for volunteer drivers of a nonprofit organization with which I am affiliated. It’s not related to the DHA paper.

INFORMS: How do you yourself keep up-to-date on the latest research in your field?

SALTZMAN: This is difficult because, as someone who works at a teaching-oriented academic institution, I spend most of my time preparing for, and being in, the classroom. I do get email feeds from various O.R. journals giving their table of contents; when something sounds relevant to my research interests, I try to take a look at it.

INFORMS: What about your career might surprise us?

SALTZMAN: In November 1993, my good friend and former grad school officemate Richard Bradford and I came up with and submitted the name Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for the proposed merger of ORSA and TIMS. Both the merger and our name for it were approved in 1994, and are obviously still with us today. That was quite a thrill.

INFORMS: When you’re not using your OR superpowers to try to make the world a better place, what are some of the ways you like to spend your time?

SALTZMAN: I enjoy traveling with my wife; we just returned from 12 days in beautiful British Columbia. I also play alto sax in a small band (mostly jazz and rock), which probably negates any good I do using O.R. to improve the world.

INFORMS: As an INFORMS member, what benefit do you find most useful?

SALTZMAN: While it’s exciting to attend major meetings and hear about all the incredible work that O.R. professionals are doing around the world, the benefit most useful to me is having online access to some of the INFORMS journals.

INFORMS: What advice would you give to your younger self?

SALTZMAN: Try to stay more connected with colleagues in industry. These folks are a great source of collaboration for research projects, teaching cases, and guest speakers in classes.

INFORMS: Which social network do you use most and why?

SALTZMAN: Facebook, because I’m addicted to Scrabble.

INFORMS: Which celebrity do you get mistaken for?

SALTZMAN: I could find no relevant data about this on www.ratemyprofessors.com, so I must not look like a celebrity. However, a friend once told me I reminded her of Bert on Sesame Street.