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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?

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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.

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