It turns out that a digital platform assembled by a Northeastern research group on short notice amid the COVID-19 pandemic substantially helped lessen a Massachusetts crisis in healthcare staffing. The partnership helped the long-term care industry and its dire need to find and hire workers during the pandemic. Ozlem Ergun, COE Distinguished Professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern, worked with her students in 2020 to design and run a centralized process that paired healthcare workers with open positions at long-term care facilities.
Ergun and her students created their centralized process and matching algorithms in less than 10 days. They managed and adjusted the formula to focus on facilities with the greatest staffing challenges, in partnership with Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human Services and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.
“The question is: Did it actually help?” asks Ergun’s colleague Yakov Bart, associate professor of marketing and Thomas E. Moore Faculty Fellow at Northeastern.
