Many hospitals are just a blip or two on the cardiac monitor away from life support. Squeezed on one side by competitive health insurance companies and on the other side by an aging population more and more in need of their services, health care providers are caught in the middle.

Enter Mark Isken, an associate professor of management information systems at Oakland University. He doesn’t have a cure. But he has some strong medicine.

“Health care is dominated by labor costs,” Isken said. “Hospitals in general have complex staff scheduling problems. Think of the recovery room. Patients show up at different times of the day. You don’t know how much work they will need. It is a big deal to match staffing to the needs of the system. Too much and you’re spending too much money; too little and you’re not meeting service needs and patient care expectations.”

Generally, scheduling is done manually, often by a committee. The process is tedious and inefficient. Isken developed software-based mathematical modeling tools that help hospitals attack difficult scheduling problems. These tools have been used at Royal Oak’s Beaumont Hospital as well as at other institutions. He plans to release the software through an open source project to others working on the problem. Refinements by information technologists, operations researchers and software engineers should lead to a simple, user-friendly product. Isken will not get rich.

“I’m not going to be selling this; I’m just looking to get this stuff out there,” he said. “I don’t have any illusions that this will solve the world’s problems, but this may be a useful tool that will chip away at one tough problem.”

And make struggling hospitals healthier.