Antoine Sauré’s Research Supports Better Decision-Making in Healthcare
Professor Antoine Sauré is a new faculty member at the Telfer School of Management whose research focuses on solving capacity-planning and patient-scheduling problems in healthcare services. Professor Sauré talked about his research interests in a recent conversation.
Can you describe your earlier career, before coming to Canada?
I’m originally from Chile, where I worked on operations management problems in a number of different industries. My last applied project before coming to Canada was with the company that runs Santiago’s subway system. It focused on determining the staffing levels and shift schedules required to operate the company’s fare collection system. That’s a classic operations management problem. Your solution has to meet a pre-defined service level for wait lines, by allocating service resources in the most cost-effective way.
You made healthcare your main focus when you came to Canada to do your Ph.D. at UBC. What drives your current research interest in healthcare?
In the healthcare field, research has the potential to help system administrators make crucial decisions that will ensure timely access to care for patients and more cost-effective healthcare delivery. Looking into healthcare problems, a researcher is always aware of the potential to improve a person’s quality of life, so that’s very rewarding.
I’m also drawn to the challenge of capturing the complexity around healthcare decisions. Service resources have to be allocated wisely, even when future demand for service is uncertain, and taking into account patient preferences and urgency levels. A researcher will use advanced analytics techniques to find a solution to the problem – one that most likely will be distilled into a practice guideline. A hospital booking clerk might be the person who will implement the guideline, and they’ll be able to do that without knowing anything about the math behind it. The research might appear complicated, while the end product is often deceptively simple.
Tell us about a healthcare-related project you have been involved in.
Most commercial patient scheduling tools in healthcare serve more like bookkeeping systems. As a member of a research team affiliated with the BC Cancer Agency, I helped develop and implement an intelligent chemotherapy appointment scheduling tool, called Chemo SmartBook, which was much more than a bookkeeping system. It had an optimization model behind it, so it provided a strong foundation to make better patient scheduling decisions. It was a huge success, enabling shorter appointment notification times for patients and also balancing the workload of nurses and pharmacists. It resulted in greater patient and staff satisfaction, because it was designed to take both viewpoints into account.
What gets you excited about the future research in this area?
More attention is being paid to operations management problems in healthcare than ever before, which is very encouraging. There’s starting to be a greater recognition that clinical innovations and operations-side innovations go hand in hand. If you have a new treatment, that new treatment might also bring higher costs, and a higher frequency of visits to be effective. So in order to provide true clinical improvement, the operational side has to be efficient. That’s where there is an expanding role for research on the operational side, because it really can lead to better use of existing resources, and thus, improved patient care.
Peter Jaskiewicz Receives a ‘Best Reviewer’ Distinction
Peter Jaskiewicz received the Best Reviewer Award from the journal Corporate Governance: An International Review (CGIR). The publisher Wiley-Blackwell and CGIR commended professor Jaskiewicz for service excellence in providing extensive and developmental reviews of manuscripts submitted to the journal.
Professor of Enduring Entrepreneurship at the Telfer School of Management, Peter Jaskiewicz conducts quantitative and qualitative research on entrepreneurship and family business.
Healthcare for Millennials: Opportunities and Challenges
A panel discussion, moderated by Dr. Ken Farion of the Faculty of Medicine and the CHEO Research Institute, brought together three of our researchers to discuss the future of healthcare services with an audience of approximately 80 healthcare professionals, students and researchers.
· Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, Full Professor and Holder of the CIHR Chair in Gender, Work and Health Human Resources
· François Chiocchio, Associate Professor and Holder of the Montfort Research Chair in the Organization of Health Services
· Craig Kuziemsky, Full Professor, Telfer School and Holder of a University Research Chair in Healthcare Innovation
The presenters shared perspectives on some of the defining healthcare system challenges for the millennial generation, and how best to prepare for them.
Professor Bourgeault put the emphasis on healthcare human-resource issues and called for renewed action by policy-makers. Canada needs a bold new approach to health workforce planning and millennials know that better than previous generations did, Bourgeault said. She predicted that the new generation will approach critical gaps in healthcare delivery through a more sophisticated health-workforce planning lens.
Professor Chiocchio said the next generation of healthcare workers will increasingly recognize interprofessional collaboration within healthcare teams as a core challenge that has to be addressed. He anticipates there will be a greater willingness to develop new competencies in areas such as project collaboration that can made a big difference in team performance, and ultimately, healthcare delivery.
Professor Kuziemsky explored the potential for the next generation of healthcare providers and users to use digital technologies in ways that produce better patient care. A true era of patient-centred medicine is coming. However, the quality of healthcare services will depend as much on innovations within the business-of-healthcare as it will on clinical innovations. He said a fundamental change needed on the business side is for individuals to become integrated into collaborative teams.
The main take-home message from this panel was that in order to seize these opportunities, healthcare providers, researchers, and users should be open to radically new approaches to the organization of healthcare work.
Business research in the National Capital Region – thesis competition and poster session
Apply today to participate in a 10-minute Thesis Competition organized by the Sprott School of Business, the Telfer School of Management, and the Université de Québec en Outaouais’s Département des sciences administratives! On September 29 at Sprott, you’ll have the opportunity to square off against your business-school peers for $6,000 in cash prizes.
To apply, write a one-page submission with your supervisor. Three submissions will be chosen by each institution to advance to the 10-minute Thesis Competition on September 29.
If your proposal does not make the shortlist, you are invited to use it to contribute to a poster session to be held just prior to the thesis competition.
Why a 10-minute Thesis Competition?
By this point in your academic career, you’re probably well acquainted with the traditional academic presentation structure: research problem, theoretical framework, methodology, results, and conclusions – in that order. That you would want to adhere to that structure for most presentations doesn’t surprise us. We get it. It’s a big part of your academic training.
But there’s another important skill for young researchers to have: communicating the impact and significance of their work right up front, and in plain language. So with the Telfer-Sprott-UQO 10-minute Thesis Competition, we’re asking presenters to abandon the traditional academic presentation structure. Instead, find an alternative way to present your project in a way that a lay person would understand. Explain what’s innovative about your project and the potential impact of the research. Tell a story. Look for creative ways to explain how and why your research matters.
Rules
Eligible students/programs
- PhD in Management - Sprott School
- Doctorat en administration, D.B.A. - gestion de projet, UQO
- Information Systems (IS) / Information Technology Management (ITM) students active in the Doctorat en sciences et technologies de l'information, UQO
- PhD in Management - Telfer School of Management
- PhD in Electronic Business Technologies, or EBT - Telfer School
- M.Sc. in Management, M.Sc. in Health Systems, M.Sc. in EBT - Telfer School
Students who presented at the May 2016 Telfer-Sprott-UQO forum are also eligible, provided they apply with a new submission/proposal.
How to apply
Prepare a one-page submission with your supervisor. Include the content that would typically be included in an academic-type presentation, but in a different format – one that highlights what’s innovative about your project and its potential impact. We’re looking for creative ways of explaining how and why the research matters.
Please send your submission via email to
Thesis competition - highlights
- Each institution will select 3 students for the presentation competition.
- Each presentation should be no more than 10 minutes in length.
- Presenters will be evaluated on their ability to convey the significance of their research with clarity and impact
- $6,000 in cash prizes will be awarded. 1st prize – $3,000; 2nd prize – $2,000$; 3rd prize – $1,000
Key dates
July 31 - Student submit their notice of intent to participate
August 18 - Due date for one-page submissions, jointly prepared by the student and his/her supervisor
Early September – Telfer School, Sprott School and UQO have each chosen their three presenters
September 29 – 10-minute Thesis Competition and poster session at the Sprott School of Business
Telfer Professor Talks Mega-Projects With MPs and Business Leaders
The Telfer School of Management continues to shape the future management of mega projects with forward-looking research and thought leadership. The latest example: an eye-opening panel discussion on complex project leadership, organized by the Pearson Centre for Progressive Policy and featuring professor Stephane Tywoniak as the keynote presenter.
With a cross-section of attendees from government, companies and industry associations present, Tywoniak said there is a global consensus about the need to reset traditional approaches to contracting for mega-projects and major procurements, as they have become ever-more-complex challenges for governments at home and abroad. He went on to present a report on a series of roundtables on complex project management with some 300 government and business leaders in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.
Tywoniak’s talk set the table for a wide-ranging panel discussion involving MPs as well as executives from CAE, Babcock Canada Inc. and Perfocus Management Inc.
Held in the parliamentary precinct on May 18, this event was part of the Pearson Centre's Economy for Tomorrow Series, which is chaired by another professor at the Telfer School, Jonathan Calof, and by Yasmin Ratansi, M.P., the Vice-Chair of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.
For more information: http://www.thepearsoncentre.ca/platform/managing-mega-projects-may18/
More about Complex Project Leadership at the Telfer School of Management
- Expert Perspectives on Teamwork in a Digital Economy
- Small Business Operators Key to Sustainable Growth
- Telfer School Welcomes Top Finance and Accounting Scholars with Experts from Bank of Canada and the International Monetary Fund
- Samir Saadi to Collaborate in an International Research Workshop on M&As
