ABSTRACT 

The rapid development of health information technology (IT) has enabled virtual care delivery, aimed at supplementing in-person services and enhancing care accessibility of patients. In this talk, we will present analytical models and computational solutions to investigate the design and operation of hybrid telehealth services in a decentralized care delivery network. Telehealth, defined as the remote diagnosis and treatment of patients by means of telecommunication technology, has been offered to ambulatory patients to manage their care, especially chronic conditions. We further consider the integration of telehealth to home healthcare services to allow for necessary in-person nursing care. In the first work, we developed a game-theoretic model for pricing design factoring in the nurse assistance cost, with the objectives to optimize the revenue of the medical institution and the welfare of the system. Our results highlight the value of flexibility induced by telehealth services and heighten the importance of insurance coverage of telehealth-related services. In the second work, we explore how to operationalize the proposed hybrid telehealth system, which entails the joint decision of the type of care (e.g., telehealth vs. in-person) delivered to individual patients, the location (e.g., patient home, community clinics, central hospital) of care delivered, and the scheduling of all kinds of nurses based on their work location. We propose a bi-level approximation and developed column generation-based heuristic algorithms to generate high-quality solutions.