Living Smart

022 023 I ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY It all comes down to incentives. Some corporations are already pushing for “private” blockchain technologies, but data integrity would only be maintained by a single private enterprise or a group and does not differ much from existing offerings. This in fact defeats the purpose of adapting blockchain as “public” blockchain technology, which thrives in a decentralized environment, often relies on the goodwill of all parties involved to expand on a greater scale. If a firm already invests in harvesting customer information for its own use, why should it share with other “free riders” by using a “public” blockchain? And how should the privacy of the data be protected, given that laws and regulations vary among countries? To conclude, blockchain may transform businesses, especially in settings where trust and data integrity are the top priority. However, we will not be able to unleash its full potential without a good grasp of its characteristics and capability. It is time for business leaders to go back to the drawing board and sketch how blockchain can play a role (or whether it should play a role at all) in business applications, processes or innovations. Published on February 27, 2019 Go with the flow to fix health woes Prof. QI Jin Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics F reshly announced in the budget three weeks ago, a new HK$10 billion stabilization fund has been earmarked to soothe Hong Kong’ s manpower-starved public medical sector. While we welcome the initiative, we can’ t help but wonder – if public hospitals are currently short-staffed and new blood requires training time – how we can cope with swamped outpatient clinics during future peak flu seasons? Media reports last month indicated that every public ward exceeded capacity, with some patients queuing for over eight hours to see a doctor. The inpatient bed occupancy rates of every hospital, aside from North Lantau and Tin Shui Wai hospitals, exceeded 100 percent almost on a daily basis. Scarce resources require carefully planned policies to ensure optimal bed allocation and quality services. This is where industrial engineering and decision analytics come in. Once linked to optimizing automated manufacturing systems, computer simulations can be applied to service-based sectors like public health services to determine bottlenecks, identify and test potential solutions. Hospital inpatients can be divided into two groups – planned (e.g., Cesarean delivery) versus unplanned (e.g., emergency wards). Each ward experiences different patient load changes, such as seasonal fluctuations and day-of-week patterns.