The efficiency of the delivery of neonatal care in the UK. (1/65)

BACKGROUND: A recent paper in Journal of Public Health Medicine (O'Neill et al., 2000; 22(1): 108-115) used regression modelling to determine the average costs of neonatal care services for a sample of 49 units in the United Kingdom in 1990-1991, and concluded that economies of scale were present in the sample as a whole. Although this form of modelling is useful, analysis of the efficiency of production for individual units is also important. METHODS: Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to analyse the data set published by O'Neil et al., to determine technical efficiency of neonatal units, measuring efficiency compared with a benchmark efficient frontier, and estimating economies of scale for each unit. Potential cost savings if units were to operate efficiently are estimated. RESULTS: There is evidence of substantial levels of technical inefficiency. Economies of scale varied between units, with increasing returns in the 36 inefficient units, and mainly constant returns in the 13 efficient units. This suggests that the presence of technical inefficiency was as important as scale inefficiencies. Total cost savings, if all units were operating efficiently, are estimated at l10.4 million, equivalent to 10 extra units producing 57,000 additional days of care. CONCLUSIONS: DEA is a technique of great potential value in analysing the efficiency of health care production. As well as inefficiencies in the production of neonatal care in the United Kingdom due to differences in the scale of production, there appears to have been considerable technical inefficiency, which was not due to differences in case mix. The potential cost savings from efficiency gains are large.  (+info)

Linear and nonlinear programming to optimize the nutrient density of a population's diet: an example based on diets of preschool children in rural Malawi. (2/65)

BACKGROUND: Food consumption surveys are often used to detect inadequate nutrient intakes but not to determine whether inadequate nutrient intakes are due to suboptimal use of locally available foods or to insufficient availability of nutrient-dense foods. OBJECTIVES: The objectives were to describe the use of linear programming as a method to design nutrient-adequate diets of optimal nutrient density and to identify the most stringent constraints in nutritional recommendations and food consumption patterns in a population's diet. DESIGN: This analysis was conducted with the use of food consumption data collected during 2 seasons from rural Malawian children aged 3-6 y. Linear programming was used to select diets based on local foods that satisfied a set of nutritional constraints while minimizing the total energy content of the diet. Additional constraints on daily intakes of foods and food groups were also introduced to ensure that the diets were compatible with local food patterns. The strength of the constraints was assessed by analyzing nonlinear programming sensitivity. RESULTS: In the harvest season, it was possible to satisfy nutritional recommendations with little departure from the local diet. In the nonharvest season, nutritional adequacy was impaired by the low availability of riboflavin- and zinc-rich animal or vegetable foods and by the high phytate content of other foods. CONCLUSIONS: This analysis suggests that nutrition education may help improve the diets of children in the harvest season, whereas changes in the range of available foods might be needed in the nonharvest season. Linear and nonlinear programming can be used to formulate recommendations with the use of data from local food consumption surveys.  (+info)

Use of linear programming to estimate impact of changes in a hospital's operating room time allocation on perioperative variable costs. (3/65)

BACKGROUND: Administrators at hospitals with a fixed annual budget may want to focus surgical services on priority areas to ensure its community receives the best health services possible. However, many hospitals lack the detailed managerial accounting data needed to ensure that such a change does not increase operating costs. The authors used a detailed hospital cost database to investigate by how much a change in allocations of operating room (OR) time among surgeons can increase perioperative variable costs. METHODS: The authors obtained financial data for all patients who underwent outpatient or same-day admit surgery during a year. Linear programming was used to determine by how much changing the mix of surgeons can increase total variable costs while maintaining the same total hours of OR time for elective cases. RESULTS: Changing OR allocations among surgeons without changing total OR hours allocated will likely increase perioperative variable costs by less than 34%. If, in addition, intensive care unit hours for elective surgical cases are not increased, hospital ward occupancy is capped, and implant use is tracked and capped, perioperative costs will likely increase by less than 10%. These four variables predict 97% of the variance in total variable costs. CONCLUSIONS: The authors showed that changing OR allocations among surgeons without changing total OR hours allocated can increase hospital perioperative variable costs by up to approximately one third. Thus, at hospitals with fixed or nearly fixed annual budgets, allocating OR time based on an OR-based statistic such as utilization can adversely affect the hospital financially. The OR manager can reduce the potential increase in costs by considering not just OR time, but also the resulting use of hospital beds and implants.  (+info)

A memory-efficient dynamic programming algorithm for optimal alignment of a sequence to an RNA secondary structure. (4/65)

BACKGROUND: Covariance models (CMs) are probabilistic models of RNA secondary structure, analogous to profile hidden Markov models of linear sequence. The dynamic programming algorithm for aligning a CM to an RNA sequence of length N is O(N3) in memory. This is only practical for small RNAs. RESULTS: I describe a divide and conquer variant of the alignment algorithm that is analogous to memory-efficient Myers/Miller dynamic programming algorithms for linear sequence alignment. The new algorithm has an O(N2 log N) memory complexity, at the expense of a small constant factor in time. CONCLUSIONS: Optimal ribosomal RNA structural alignments that previously required up to 150 GB of memory now require less than 270 MB.  (+info)

A cost constraint alone has adverse effects on food selection and nutrient density: an analysis of human diets by linear programming. (5/65)

Economic constraints may contribute to the unhealthy food choices observed among low socioeconomic groups in industrialized countries. The objective of the present study was to predict the food choices a rational individual would make to reduce his or her food budget, while retaining a diet as close as possible to the average population diet. Isoenergetic diets were modeled by linear programming. To ensure these diets were consistent with habitual food consumption patterns, departure from the average French diet was minimized and constraints that limited portion size and the amount of energy from food groups were introduced into the models. A cost constraint was introduced and progressively strengthened to assess the effect of cost on the selection of foods by the program. Strengthening the cost constraint reduced the proportion of energy contributed by fruits and vegetables, meat and dairy products and increased the proportion from cereals, sweets and added fats, a pattern similar to that observed among low socioeconomic groups. This decreased the nutritional quality of modeled diets, notably the lowest cost linear programming diets had lower vitamin C and beta-carotene densities than the mean French adult diet (i.e., <25% and 10% of the mean density, respectively). These results indicate that a simple cost constraint can decrease the nutrient densities of diets and influence food selection in ways that reproduce the food intake patterns observed among low socioeconomic groups. They suggest that economic measures will be needed to effectively improve the nutritional quality of diets consumed by these populations.  (+info)

Measuring efficiency of physician practices using data envelopment analysis. (6/65)

PURPOSE: Medical-group practices are becoming increasingly common-place, with more than a third of licensed physicians in the United States currently working in this mode. While previous studies have focused on physician practices, little attention has been focused specifically on the contribution of internal organizational factors to overall physician practice efficiency. This paper develops a model to help determine best practices of efficient physician offices while allowing for choices between inputs. Measuring how efficient practices provide services yields useful information to help improve performance of less efficient practices. DESIGN: Data for this study were obtained from the 1999 Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Cost Report. In this study, 115 primary care physician practices are analyzed. Outputs are defined as gross charges; inputs include square footage and medical, technical, and administrative support personnel. METHODOLOGY: Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used in this study to develop a model of practice outputs and inputs to help identify the most efficient medical groups. DEA is a linear programming technique that converts multiple input and output measures to a single comprehensive measure of efficiency. These practices are used as a reference set for comparisons with less efficient ones. CONCLUSION: The overall results indicate that size of physician practice does not increase efficiency. There does not appear to be extensive substitution among inputs. Compared to other practices, efficient practices seem to manage each input well.  (+info)

Inferring strengths of protein-protein interactions from experimental data using linear programming. (7/65)

MOTIVATION: Several computational methods have been proposed for inference of protein-protein interactions. Most of the existing methods assume that protein-protein interaction data are given as binary data (i.e. whether or not each protein pair interacts). However, multiple biological experiments are performed for the same protein pairs and thus the ratio (strength) of the number of observed interactions to the number of experiments is available for each protein pair. RESULTS: We propose a new method for inference of protein-protein interactions from such experimental data. This method tries to minimize the errors between the ratios of observed interactions and the predicted probabilities in training data, where this problem is formalized as a linear program based on a probabilistic model. We compared the proposed method with the association method, the EM method and the SVM-based method using real interaction data. It is shown that a variant of the method is comparable to existing methods for binary data. It is also shown that the method outperforms existing methods for numerical data. AVAILABILITY: Programs transforming input data into LP format files are available upon request.  (+info)

Optimization models for cancer classification: extracting gene interaction information from microarray expression data. (8/65)

MOTIVATION: Microarray data appear particularly useful to investigate mechanisms in cancer biology and represent one of the most powerful tools to uncover the genetic mechanisms causing loss of cell cycle control. Recently, several different methods to employ microarray data as a diagnostic tool in cancer classification have been proposed. These procedures take changes in the expression of particular genes into account but do not consider disruptions in certain gene interactions caused by the tumor. It is probable that some genes participating in tumor development do not change their expression level dramatically. Thus, they cannot be detected by simple classification approaches used previously. For these reasons, a classification procedure exploiting information related to changes in gene interactions is needed. RESULTS: We propose a MAximal MArgin Linear Programming (MAMA) method for the classification of tumor samples based on microarray data. This procedure detects groups of genes and constructs models (features) that strongly correlate with particular tumor types. The detected features include genes whose functional relations are changed for particular cancer types. The proposed method was tested on two publicly available datasets and demonstrated a prediction ability superior to previously employed classification schemes. AVAILABILITY: The MAMA system was developed using the linear programming system LINDO http://www.lindo.com. A Perl script that specifies the optimization problem for this software is available upon request from the authors.  (+info)