Browsing by Author "Vilkkumaa, Eeva, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Information and Service Management, Finland"

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  • Model-based efficiency analyses of healthcare delivery
    (2018) Hynninen, Yrjänä
     School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
    In the years to come, healthcare organizations are challenged to deliver care to more patients, of higher quality, and with scarce financial and human resources. To improve the value of healthcare delivery, allocating resources efficiently is paramount. In support of allocation decisions, there is an increasing amount and variety of patient-related information available from, for example, clinical tests and biomarkers. This information provides substantial possibilities of improving healthcare but, nevertheless, its full exploitation requires advanced methods.  This Dissertation develops and applies mathematical models to support the efficient use and allocation of resources in healthcare. The models help assess the efficiency of healthcare systems and thus identify best practices for learning. Furthermore, the models can be used to identify efficient testing and intervention strategies. These models can support, for instance, the benchmarking of healthcare systems, clinicians' decision making, policy making, and decisions on the acquisition or price setting of testing or treatment technologies. The Dissertation provides evidence in support of the claim that systematic methods of efficiency and decision analysis help improve the practices of healthcare. For example, the Dissertation demonstrates that the use of decision-analytic modeling and optimization methods is useful when identifying such prevention, detection, and treatment actions which are, on the one hand, targeted based on patients' personal information, and, on the other hand, efficient on the population-level examination. Also, making the impact of value judgments explicit related to healthcare resource allocation decisions is important and possible with advanced models and methods.