Get Your Flu Vaccine in the Fall
Will you be getting a vaccine in the fall? We're not talking about the vaccine you think we are, of course. The most important vaccine that every person should get is for seasonal influenza.
The INFORMS Analytics+ Conference showcased how companies are turning advanced analytics and AI into measurable operational results
In most emergency departments, beds are a hot commodity. But some patients don’t actually need a bed for their treatment – and accurately identifying those people is a low-lift but effective way to increase efficiency without sacrificing care quality, finds a study recently published in the journal Management Science.
The researchers developed a simple decision tree, informed by mathematical and machine learning models, to help staff decide whether a patient truly needs a bed or can be routed to a “vertical processing pathway” – that is, an area where they can be treated sitting up. Many hospitals already have such an area but don’t necessarily have a systematic way to decide which patients are treated there.
American teenagers start their school day too early.
Medical experts have been clear for years: sleep cycle changes during puberty make it hard for teenagers to learn in the early morning. Later school start times have been linked to better sleep, improved mental health, stronger academic performance and even safer driving.
Most school district leaders know about this problem and care about fixing it. But changing the schedule can feel operationally impossible.
An audio journey of how data and analytics save lives, save money and solve problems.

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Will you be getting a vaccine in the fall? We're not talking about the vaccine you think we are, of course. The most important vaccine that every person should get is for seasonal influenza.
From Amazon to Alibaba, the world’s top online marketplaces sell about $2 trillion in third-party products a year, generating sizeable profits just by opening their websites to other vendors. But many marketplace-style websites may be leaving cash on the table because of how they’re charging vendors to sell their goods online.
Lauren Steimle is an assistant professor and Dima Nazzal is the director of professional practice in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Working with an undergraduate and graduate student, they put social distancing plans by colleges to a test and find colleges are overly optimistic about their ability to create social distance in classrooms.
A new research paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that blocking out the middle seat on airplanes could cause the likelihood of passengers being infected with coronavirus to drop by nearly half, just as some airlines are starting to book flights to capacity again.
As many airlines begin filling their middle seats and ending the era of social distancing on flights, a new research paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is raising questions about the risks associated with packing planes full of people.

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