Participants:
Faculty/Clinicians/Staff: Amy Cohn, Cliff Guyton, April Maa
Students: Kate Burns, Dima Chaar, Michelle Chen, Jordan Goodman, Malcolm Hudson, Jiaqi Lei, Matthew Levenson, James McAuliffe, Justin Rogers, Muhammed Ugur, Adam VanDeusen, Carolyn Wu
Project Contact: [email protected]
Project Synopsis:
Access to preventive eye care is critical in preventing blindness from chronic eye disease, especially for higher-risk patient populations, including veterans. The Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system has implemented the Technology-based Eye Care Services (TECS) program to improve access by offering chronic eye disease screening performed by ophthalmic technicians. The Eye Access project aims to help the VA evaluate how to locate different types of providers throughout a region so that veterans can access eye care screenings at clinics that are geographically near them. This project is a collaboration with the Dr. April Maa, an ophthalmologist with the VA in Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) 7, based in Georgia.
We have developed facility location models that assist VA leaders in understanding which clinic locations should offer eye disease screening, what provider type(s) should staff each location, and which patients should be screened each location. We solve these models using mixed-integer programming and consider several objectives, including screening the most patients possible or minimizing cost, subject to a set of constraints. These models can help the VA understand how to organize eye care providers throughout a region, allowing more veterans to access preventive eye care.
Papers, Posters, & Presentations:
Posters:
- “Improving Veteran Access to Eye Care Using Facility Location Models.” Undergraduate Research Symposium, Ann Arbor MI, April 2019.
- “Improving Veteran Access to Eye Care Using Facility Location Models.” CHEPS Symposium, Ann Arbor MI, September 2018.
Presentations:
- “Evaluating Screening and Care of Diabetic Retinopathy in Veterans Using Mixed-integer Programming and Simulation.” INFORMS Annual Meeting, Seattle WA, October 2019.
- “Improving Veteran Access to Eye Care Using Facility Location Models.” Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference, San Antonio TX, February 2019.
- “Evaluating Veteran Access to Eye Care Services Using Facility Location Models.” INFORMS Annual Meeting, Phoenix AZ, November 2018.
- “Systems Engineering and Ophthalmologic Telemedicine: Preventing Blindness.” [VIDEO] Providing Better Healthcare through Systems Engineering Seminar Series, Ann Arbor MI, October 2018.