Essays on the Interface of Health Care and Operations Management: Human Judgement, Quality and Technology

For decades, the importance of applying theories and techniques in operations management to healthcare has been recognized by many researchers and practitioners. But due to the highly human-centered characteristic and the high risk involved in healthcare, these well-established theories need to be further studied before they are “borrowed” from manufacturing or other service sectors. In response to this need, and motivated by real applications on the interface of health care and operations management, this thesis studies two important aspects of healthcare operations: (1) discretion in task completion due to human judgment and its impact on quality: we analyze a quality-based scheduling problem and a quality-centric service system respectively in the first two essays; (2) healthcare technology adoption and its link to traditional operations management strategies such as inventory theory, which is the proposed work in the third essay.