mem·o·ry·less·ness

A team of researchers has used data-mining and machine-learning techniques to find subtle changes in electrical activity in the heart that can be used to predict potentially fatal heart attacks. Researchers from the University of Michigan, MIT, Harvard Medical School and Brigham Women’s Hospital in Boston sifted through 24-hour electrocardiograms (which measure the electrical activity in the heart) from 4,557 heart-attack patients to find errant patterns that until now had been dismissed as noise or were undetectable.

(via INFORMS)

My original thesis project in graduate school related to optimal ambulance routing. It’s good to see people using operations research in that manner, and it’s not surprising how lucrative it can be.

“It’s about how you match the resources you have got available most effectively to the emergency calls that are coming in and it’s not just matching the ambulance to the call but also matching it from a geographic sense as well,” said Mackay. “It’s a very difficult thing for somebody to do in their head which is typically what happens in most dispatch centres.”

…

In the United States there are 15,000 individual ambulance providers and another 30,000 fire providers.

“North America alone for us is potentially a billion dollar market. Even if we can get 5 per cent of that we’ll be doing well.”

via chlady:

The system is just one example of how Seattle Children’s Hospital says it has improved patient care, and its bottom line, by using practices made famous by Toyota and others. The main goals of the approach, known as kaizen, are to reduce waste and to increase value for customers through continuous small improvements.

…

Brian Lucas, a spokesman for Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, says the lean efforts have been used to reduce unnecessary tasks and have not resulted in lower nurse-to-patient ratios. “To the contrary,” he said, “they have allowed nurses to spend more time delivering care to patients.”

It’s good to see that OR/IE is alive in healthcare.  While I agree with the nurses who think time studies are inappropriate for hospitals, inventory management could greatly benefit healthcare providers from both a cost and a patient care perspective.

Now if someone would just implement this.  :-)

Kailas Narendran, a friend of mine from high school, is one of the founders of a company called Myomo that was recently profiled in the New York Times. They have developed a joint brace that helps patients with limited mobility in their arms regain some of that mobility.

“The device is designed to help get patients over a functional hump - so they can start moving the weakened arm again, said John McBean, a mechanical engineer who developed the technology with Kailas Narendran, an electrical engineer and computer scientist. (The two began the project in 2002, in a graduate robotics class at M.I.T.)”

This is amazing work and I’m glad to know someone who’s involved in it.

(read the whole article)