The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) launched the Wait Time Strategy in 2004 to improve access to healthcare by reducing the wait times for procedures and treatments. A fundamental component of the strategy was the development of the Wait Time Information System (WTIS). On behalf of the MOHLTC, Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) delivered the first electronic application used by ho...

This paper deals with a bi-objective hybrid no-wait flowshop scheduling problem minimizing the makespan and total weighted tardiness, in which we consider transportation times between stages. Obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time by using traditional approaches and optimization tools is extremely difficult. This paper presen...

We introduce the concept of Many Systems Concurrency Control (MSCC). We describe how MSCC can provide a scalable solution for shared state access in multiprocessor architectures. When contention for shared state increases we can afford additional resources to maintain overall performance. To achieve scalability we introduce the concept of no-wait synchronization. No-wait synchronization describ...

Long wait times for specialist consultation affect patient care and health outcomes adversely. The wait-time continuum has various components, one of which is the wait time from referral request by a family physician to specialist appointment. The Committee on Utilization, Review, and Education (CURE), comprising a group of family physicians from the Department of Family Medicine at St Joseph’s...

BACKGROUND In 2006, the Canadian Cardiovascular Society (CCS) Access to Care Working Group recommended a 30-day wait time benchmark for cardiac rehabilitation (CR). The objectives of the current study were to: (1) describe cardiac patient perceptions of actual and ideal CR wait times, (2) describe and compare cardiac specialist and CR program perceptions of wait times, as well as whether the re...

one of the main challenges for manufacturers in production systems on order is balancing between orders, inputs and limited resources. hence, they have to choose some orders and reject the others. in addition, work schedule must be considered in order acceptance. in this research the integrated problem of scheduling and order acceptance in a no wait flexible flow line production system is discu...

Excessive wait times for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies are a major problem in the Canadian healthcare system. To determine how requests for MRI studies are managed, the authors performed a survey of public MRI facilities in Canada. Ninety-six per cent had some method to triage MRI requests. However, only 42% had documented guidelines for prioritization, and none employed quality assu...

Objective. The Canadian Association of Gastroenterology Wait Time Consensus Group recommends that patients with symptoms associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) should have an endoscopic examination within 2 months. However, in a recent survey of Canadian gastroenterologists, wait-times for endoscopy were considerably longer than the current guidelines recommend. The purpose of this study was t...