INFORMS 2021 Program Book

INFORMS Anaheim 2021

SB42

estimation methods, we recover key parameters that govern hospitals’ decisions to invest in quality improvement, including the financial and non-financial costs and uncertain outcomes of investment. Our counterfactual analyses explore the benefits, on the one hand, of modifying the overall size of the yardstick incentives and, on the other hand, of implementing a more focused program tailored to hospital type. 3 - Focusing Provider Attention: An Empirical Examination of Incentives and Feedback in Flu Vaccinations RJ Niewoehner, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, McColl Building, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, United States, Bradley R. Staats Influenza imposes heavy societal costs through healthcare expenditures, missed days of work, and numerous hospitalizations each year. Considering these costs, the healthcare and behavioral science literature offers suggestions on increasing patient demand for flu vaccinations. And yet, the adult flu vaccination rate fluctuated between 37% and 46% between 2010 and 2019. In this paper, we investigate how to improve clinic vaccination rates by altering provider behavior. We implement and study a flu vaccine intervention among 145 clinics from 9 different states. We find clinics that received relative performance feedback outperformed all others. Moreover, we also find clinics in this group exhibit rank response behavior, specifically Last-Place Aversion. Overall, we find that clinic- level performance feedback can effectively drive operational improvement. SB41 CC Room 212A In Person: Energy Infrastructure Resilience and Economic Impacts General Session Chair: Mohamad Darayi, The Pennsylvania State University-Great Valley, Malvern, PA, 19355-1488, United States 1 - Enhancing Electric Power Network Resilience: Decision Making under Uncertainty Mohamad Darayi, The Pennsylvania State University-Great Valley, Malvern, PA, 19355-1488, United States The resilience of the electric power network is crucial for the economic productivity of the states and the broader country. This work integrates a network flow formulation with an economic interdependency model to quantify the multi-industry impacts of a disruption in the power network and proposes a decision-making model to help policymakers allocate resources under uncertainty to enhance the power network resilience. 2 - A Multiple-drones-multiple-trucks Routing Problem for Disruption Assessment Nazanin Morshedlou (Tajik), PhD, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, 39769, United States, Alireza Ermagun We propose a Multiple-Drones-Multiple-Trucks (MDMT) routing problem to assess infrastructure in the areas of disruption epicenters. The information about the number of disrupted infrastructure components, the level of disruption, and the stochasticity of disruption distribution are not entirely known. Therefore, the information collected by drones also forms the base of belief systems that guides drones to more vulnerable/disrupted areas. For large-scale problems, we propose a local search heuristic algorithm to obtain near-optimal solutions in a timely manner. The sensitivity analyses prove the efficiency of the algorithm in unknown environments.

SB39 CC Room 211A In Person: Food & Agriculture Supply Chain Analytics General Session Chair: Retsef Levi, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 02142-1320, United States 1 - Leverage Data Science to Assess Market-level Food Safety and Zoonotic Disease Outbreak Risks in China Qihua Gao, Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States Many zoonotic outbreaks in China (e.g., COVID-19) and significant food-safety risks have been associated with wholesale markets (WSMs) and wet markets (WMs). This first-of-its-kind work offers an alternative pragmatic approach, by showing correlation between these two types of risks. Leveraging a massive, self- constructed dataset of food safety tests, market-level food-safety risk scores are created through machine learning techniques. Analysis shows that provinces selling more animals through high-risk markets have more human cases of zoonotic flu. Additionally, specific markets associated with zoonotic disease are high-risk, and high-risk markets have more negative news stories related to management deficiencies. This approach may offer a new way of understanding zoonotic disease risks, as well as informing regulatory approaches to reduce them. 2 - Informal Cross-border Trade in Africa: Operations, Policy, and Opportunities Karthik Murali, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, United States, Michael Lim, Jimin Park Informal cross-border trade (ICBT) refers to illegal activities of cross-border commerce conducted by unregistered small-scale traders. While ICBT is a customary trading practice pervasive in most countries in Africa, local governments exert costly effort to prohibit such activities due to concerns of public safety and shrinking tax revenues. We examine the operations, policy implications, and the key market dynamics of the ICBT process. Guided by UN directives, we also propose alternative trading schemes and policy guidelines to improve the welfare of various stakeholders in this context. 3 - Understanding and Preventing Avian Influenza Outbreaks in Live Poultry Markets in China El Ghali Ahmed Zerhouni, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 02141, United States, Retsef Levi, Nicholas J. Renegar Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) is widely considered to be a potential source for the next global pandemic. Here we analyze China’s poultry supply chain and present an epidemiological model to explain the central role of live poultry markets in HPAI outbreaks. We find that even with negligible infection rates at the farms level, environmental infection can produce disease amplification within markets, thus explaining empirical observations about HPAI outbreaks and disease rates that have not been explained in previous models. Our results imply that sanitation and other interventions targeted at lowering the environmental infection within markets could significantly lower the likelihood of future HPAI outbreaks. SB40 CC Room 211B In Person: Empirical Operations Management Job Market Candidates General Session Chair: RJ Niewoehner, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, United States 1 - Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety through Access to Human Contact Michelle A. Shell, Boston University, Dover, MA, 02030-1820, United States Through a series of lab and field experiments, conducted in the high-anxiety domain of financial services, we document the negative effects of anxiety on customer performance and demonstrate how providing customers with access to human contact can improve customers’ willingness to engage, elevate choice satisfaction and engender trust in companies. 2 - Searching for the Best Yardstick: Cost of Quality Improvements in the U.S. Hospital Industry Jong Myeong Lim, The Wharton School, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States, Kenneth Moon, Sergei Savin The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program is Medicare’s implementation of yardstick incentives applied to hospitals in the U.S. Under the VBP Program, 2% of all Medicare payments, estimated to be US$1.9B in FY2021, are withheld and redistributed based on relative performance in the quality of delivered care. We develop a dynamic equilibrium model in which hospitals are engaged in a repeated competition under yardstick incentives. Using structural

SB42 CC Room 212B In Person: Artificial Intelligence I Contributed Session Chair: Michael Mark, EPFL, Switzerland

1 - Creating a Self-sufficient Virtual Platform for Medical Visits For Expectant Mothers Using High-reliability Organizations and the Human-organization-technology Model Arianne Gleiser, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States, Nikhil Patel, Yalda Khashe Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Digital Health has been widely adopted in several medical fields. The CDC reported a 154% increase in telehealth visits between March 2019 and March 2020, demonstrating that virtual visits are the future of medicine. Past studies show a correlation between virtual visits, High-Reliability Organizations, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and create Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for these visits to be successful. We decided to create a platform that will include an appointment scheduler, virtual video, and instant messaging tool, discussion board for women, and vital monitoring software, developed with Artificial Intelligence while incorporating the latter KPIs.

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