Course ORHC: "Operations Research and Health Care"

Course description:
Global and national developments cause the health of populations and individuals to pose new problems for societies and organizations. As expectations rise and populations age, the burden of health care cost becomes increasingly difficult to carry. Society is presented with tough decision problems regarding the efficient, effective and equitable use of scarce resources to improve our precious health. For many of these problems, operations research provides valuable solution methods.
In this course, we start by overviewing topics, methodology, models, and objectives for health care decision making. We subsequently provide an in depth and rigorous mathematical treatment of operations research applications in a variety of prominent domains. Partly, the material will be based on application of classical operations research methods e.g. from combinatorial optimization or queuing theory) to problems in the domain of health care. Another part of the course addresses health care specific problems and methods, which go beyond classical OR applications.
The course will be organized by topic:
- Health services research methodology
- Outpatient planning (Queuing, Scheduling)
- Resource Planning & Scheduling (Scheduling, Branch-and-Price, Stochastic Programming)
- Human resource planning (Rostering, Crew Scheduling)
- Health Chain Planning (Supply Chain Planning, Combinatorial Optimization, Queuing)
- Medical decision making (decision making under uncertainty, utility maximization)
- Epidemiological models (Markov decision models, sensitivity analysis)
- Optimization problems in Quality & Safety (Risk modeling, markets)
- Benchmarking (Data Envelopment Analysis, Stochastic Frontier Analysis)

Literature:
Papers/handouts

Prerequisites:
Understanding of queuing theory and combinatorial optimization at M.Sc. level.

Examination:
4 take home problems.

Address of the lecturers:
Dr. E.W. Hans
University of Twente, Department of Operational Methods for Production and Logistics
P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede.
Phone: 053 - 4893523 E-mail: e.w.hans@utwente.nl

Prof.dr. J.J. van de Klundert
Erasmus University, Institute of Health Policy & Management
P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam
Phone: 010 - 4088595 E-mail: vandeklundert@bmg.eur.nl