Handbook of Healthcare Analytics: Theoretical Minimum for Conducting 21st Century Research on Healthcare Operations

How  can analytics scholars and healthcare professionals access the most  exciting and important healthcare topics and tools for the 21st century?

Editors  Tinglong Dai and Sridhar Tayur, aided by a team of internationally  acclaimed experts, have curated this timely volume to help newcomers and  seasoned researchers alike to rapidly comprehend a diverse set of  thrusts and tools in this rapidly growing cross-disciplinary field. The Handbook  covers a wide range of macro-, meso- and micro-level thrusts—such as  market design, competing interests, global  health, personalized medicine, residential care and concierge medicine,  among others—and structures what has been a highly fragmented research  area into a coherent scientific discipline.

The  handbook also provides an easy-to-comprehend introduction to five  essential research tools—Markov decision process, game theory and  information economics, queueing games, econometric methods, and data  science—by illustrating their uses and applicability on examples from  diverse healthcare settings, thus connecting tools with thrusts.

The  primary audience of the Handbook includes analytics scholars interested  in healthcare and healthcare practitioners interested in analytics.  This Handbook:

• Instills  analytics scholars with a way of thinking that incorporates behavioral,  incentive, and policy considerations in various healthcare settings.  This change in perspective—a shift in gaze away from narrow, local and  one-off operational improvement efforts that do not replicate, scale or  remain sustainable—can lead to new knowledge and innovative solutions  that healthcare has been seeking so desperately.
• Facilitates  collaboration between healthcare experts and analytics scholar to frame  and tackle their pressing concerns through appropriate modern  mathematical tools designed for this very purpose.

The  handbook is designed to be accessible to the independent reader, and it  may be used in a variety of settings, from a short lecture series on  specific topics to a semester-long course.