Completed Projects
Completed Healthcare Projects
Modelling Acute Capacity in Hospitals
Contacts: Sandy Rutherford (sandyr@irmacs.sfu.ca) and Les Vertesi (les_vertesi@sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: British Columbia Ministry of Health, NSERC
Modelling in Healthcare Seminar Series and Book
Contact: Sandy Rutherford (sandyr@irmacs.sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: NSERC
This seminar series met weekly to discuss two papers (presented by seminar members) regarding modelling in healthcare. A compilation of the information presented in this series was prepared in the form of a book entitled Modelling in Healthcare.
Modelling Home and Community Care
Contact: Sandy Rutherford (sandyr@irmacs.sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: The British Columbia Ministry of Health, MITACS and NSERC
The Home and Community Care (HCC) branch of health care deals with individuals who require long-term non-hospitalized care. As various demographic factors change, the demand for this form of care will also change. Future work will refine these models and develop new models for other aspects of the health care system.
Contact: Alexa van der Waall (awaall@irmacs.sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: British Columbia Ministry of Health, NSERC
Working with the British Columbia Ministry of Health, the CSMG developed queueing theory models of provincial waitlists for hip and knee joint replacement surgeries and for cataract surgery. These models are currently being used for resource and budget planning to meet national surgical waitlist guidelines. Further work on the project may concern managing multiple priorities, incorporating demographic factors and exploring wait-time dynamics.
Modelling Determinants of Obesity
Contact: Krisztina Vásárhelyi (kvasarhelyi(AT)irmacs.sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: Canadian Institutes of Health Research
The significant increase in obesity during the past ten years has serious public health consequences. Obesity is a risk factor in many chronic diseases, such as osteoarthritis, diabetes, and heart disease. The alarming increase in childhood and adolescent obesity is a source of particular public health concern. In collaboration with Dr. Diane Finegood, Professor at the SFU’s School of Kinesiology and Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes, the CSMG modelled the demographic and social determinants of obesity. The goal was not only to understand how social dynamics contribute to obesity, but also to explore the role these dynamics may play in correcting the problem. CSMG’s models drew on ideas from three main areas: dynamic Markov processes, compartment epidemiological models, and models such as the random field Ising model, which exhibits collective phenomena.
Contact: Krisztina Vásárhelyi (kvasarhelyi(AT)irmacs.sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: British Columbia Ministry of Health, NSERC
Highly complex processes determine how and why people require healthcare. The attainment of healthcare is influenced by many factors, including chronic disease, infectious diseases, accidents, lifestyle, and beliefs. The CSMG was asked by the British Columbia Ministry of Health to evaluate methods for modelling this process. The result was a comprehensive analysis of numerous approaches to modelling healthcare demand. Future work will concentrate on models to aid healthcare policy development.
Modelling Operating Room Scheduling
Contact: Warren Hare (whare(AT)irmacs.sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: Fraser Health Authority
In most hospitals, the operating room inflicts the greatest demand on both hospital resources and highly qualified personnel. As such, the question of how to efficiently schedule operating procedures is critical to the running of any hospital. This project explored the potential of recent advances in optimization and simulation in improving operating room efficiency. Future goals include a simulation tool to explore how far in advance surgeries should be scheduled in order to find a balance between high efficiency and appropriate access to care for emergency surgeries.
Modelling Post-surgery Recovery Rates
Contact: Warren Hare (whare(AT)irmacs.sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: Fraser Health Authority
Surgery is a draining experience on the human body, and post-surgery health is generally less than 100%. Modelling how the human body recovers from surgery can be useful in checking how a patient is proceeding, and in determining post-surgery operating budgets. This project studied the post-surgery recovery rates for patients undergoing Total Hip Arthroplasty and Total Knee Arthroplasty, and the patient factors (age, gender, etc.) that impacted these rates. Future projects may examine alternate surgery types and how to use recovery curve information to determine optimal post-surgery therapy session schedules.
Completed Criminology Projects
Contact: Vahid Dabbaghian (vdabbagh@irmacs.sfu.ca)
Project funded in part by: RCMP, MITACS and NSERC
Crime is a complex phenomenon in society and is influenced by many societal factors and constraints. These include, but are not limited to, the social networks of offenders and potential offenders, the awareness spaces of offenders and victims, the design of road networks and other urban infrastructure, prevailing policy decisions, land usage and zoning and technology. These influences impact the spatial and temporal distribution of crime in urban centres. This group focused on incorporating these influences using agent-based modelling and cellular automata models to consider the complexity of crime patterns in urban centres.