Post Your Answer
1 month ago in Operations Research By Meera
If OR is so great, why don’t hospitals actually use it?
There's a mountain of OR literature on scheduling, queuing, and resource allocation in healthcare. So why do most hospitals still run on spreadsheets and gut instinct?
All Answers (1 Answers In All)
By Jennifer Answered 1 month ago
The implementation gap is real and stubborn. Academic models are often too idealized—they assume clean data, stable processes, and cooperative players. Reality is messy: data is missing, clinicians distrust "black boxes," and no one has time to learn your optimization package. Cultural resistance is huge: experience beats optimization in most clinicians' eyes. And incentives misalign implementing OR takes time, and time is already scarce. The fix? Participatory design: build tools with practitioners, not for them. Pilot small. Show value. Win trust. Then scale.
Reply to Jennifer
Related Questions