On December 7, invited by Prof. Jie Song in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, College of Engineering (COE), Professor Nan Liu from Columbia University gave a talk to faculties and students of COE. The lecture was entitled “Revenue Management for Outpatient Care Service”.

Professor Nan Liu is currently with Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.  His research focuses on stochastic models, dynamic decision-making and applied statistical analysis, with applications to the (health) service industry. Much of his work bridges data analytics and systems modeling, and has focused on the design and control of service systems facing complex customer behaviors.  His recent work investigates customer preference and choice in the healthcare market and their impact on healthcare management.  In addition, he has done extensive work on health policy research using data-driven operations modeling.  His research has been published in leading journals in both fields of operations management and health administration/policy, including Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, Health Services Research, Medical Care Research and Review, and Public Administration Review.  His work has received a wide range of media attention including the Washington Post and Crain's New York Business.

Professor Liu pointed out in the talk that Outpatient care service was often managed via appointment scheduling. However, evidence suggested that a tremendous amount of provider time was wasted due to the inefficiency of appointment scheduling systems currently in use. In specific, they developed models that account for heterogeneous patient preferences in appointment choice offering.  The provider had a certain number of appointment slots to fill in a day.  They considered two possible ways that the provider may interact with patients. First, the provider offered a set of appointment choices to patients, who then chose according to their preferences. This resembled an online appointment scheduling system (e.g., zocdoc.com in the US and guahao.com.cn in China), which had become increasingly popular among patients and providers.  Secondly, the scheduler may sequentially offer several sets of appointment choices. They estimated that, based on the US medical reimbursement data, the efficiency gained by adopting these policies as opposed to ignoring patient choice behavior could translate into additional revenues of US$26-150k per year for a primary care provider that saw 30 patients a day.

The talk aroused great interests among the COE faculties and students. They raised a lot of questions and  Prof. Liu answered them accordingly. The faculties in Industrial Engineering and Management also introduced some current healthcare issues in China, and by sharing the ideas, future potential research topics have been greatly discussed.