Five months have come and gone since the U.S. presidential election and three months have come and gone since the inauguration, and yet the country remains evenly divided over almost everything even remotely related to politics. No, I didn’t expect partisan passions to magically dissipate after Election Day, but I did expect some sort of compromised agreement on how to best fix a U.S. healthcare and associated insurance system that all parties agree is flawed, needs fixing and is in everyone’s interest to do so.
Organizations of all sizes and types are awash in data possibilities, yet most of them cannot capitalize on the potential for a variety of reasons. The good news, however, is that with the right decisions and focus, these possibilities can turn quickly into realized opportunities.
Some years ago, I got a call from “Frank,” a finance director at a start-up company with a cloud-based software solution. Its platform was hosted by one of the large public cloud providers, and that was why he was calling. “The bills for hosting have been outrageous,” said Frank, who had called me based on a strong referral from a former consulting colleague. “Charges are rising at a ferocious rate, much faster than revenue. As far as data, we do get a bill from our provider with a ton of detail in it, but we are having a hard time getting our arms around what’s driving the peaks in the traffic loads. We are really worried about managing these costs as we grow.”
The big news for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in March was the failure of the alternative healthcare bill on the House floor. For the first time since the election campaign season began, we heard real conversations between politicians and their constituents about healthcare. The uproar about healthcare in recent times made us confront the age-old question in the United States: Is healthcare a right or an entitlement?
Back in the days before the data deluge, there were clear and distinct roles regarding IT and Finance in the healthcare industry. When patient and payer medical information was captured on multipage paper documents attached to a clipboard, it was easy to manage the data, however ineffectively. But those days are long gone. Healthcare organizations now need to take a serious look at the potential business value of developing a strategic partnership with IT in order to create analytic solutions that deliver quantifiable results.
Holiday Retirement won the 2017 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences from INFORMS for its use of operations research (O.R.) to improve the pricing model for its more than 300 senior living communities across the United States.
All over the world, healthcare organizations are being challenged by obstacles related to the aging of the population and other global trends. It is vital that the complex and growing demands in healthcare delivery are tackled swiftly and optimally. With the abundance of data available, operations researchers across the globe can pool resources and share solutions to come up with innovative ideas to remedy shortcomings within current healthcare systems. The 2017 INFORMS Healthcare Conference, to be held July 26-28 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, is the ideal forum for O.R. professionals to come together to optimize health service operations and outcomes.
The 39th Annual ISMS Marketing Science Conference will be held June 7-10 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
I have, like many others, been caught up in the Hamilton craze. Duels are a central feature of the Broadway show, with three prominently featured, two of which were fatal. Since neither I nor Analytics editor Peter Horner have been able to procure tickets via the normal means, we will have to settle for the next best thing – math about Hamilton. Below is a letter that I imagine written by a statistician to a number theorist who had offended him. Should Peter receive tickets before I do, I may challenge him to a duel.
The International Space Station requires occasional resupply of food, water and equipment from payloads that are delivered by rockets. Because rockets require their payloads to be balanced, deciding where to place cargo is critical to mission success.
