A review of applications of operational research in healthcare coordination in disaster management

Many disasters that have happened in the last decades, including the latest COVID-19 pandemic, have caused a shortage of healthcare resources and change in healthcare operations. Given these impacts, the Operational Research (OR) community has applied various approaches to improve the emergency medical responses. Coordination of healthcare facilities is one of the emergency medical response strategies to ensure the continued provision of medical services during disasters. Although the existing literature reviews of OR approaches have included the perspective of healthcare management, they focused mostly on the application of OR in disaster operations and logistics management. The importance of coordination in healthcare systems during disasters is well recognised in the literature, but to the best of our knowledge there has been no review of the published research in this area. This study provides a focused literature review of the OR contributions in the coordination in healthcare systems during disasters. Definitions of the terms in use in this field are provided. An overall descriptive statistics of the reviewed articles is given, followed by the review of the presented research problems, disaster types, and developed methodologies. The main characteristics of models for the coordination in the healthcare system are described. Measures of coordination effectiveness that denote healthcare resilience are discussed. Based on our findings, we suggest future research directions in the context of existing models extension, and application and development of other methodologies with the aim to provide a solid basis for OR research in the healthcare disaster management.