The 50th ORAHS conference is intended as an opportunity to ponder on 50 years of health operational research and its practical and methodological impact.
Our reflections will also be addressed to the new challenges in OR for healthcare such as the integration of healthcare services in order to deliver better quality care. From the seminal works of Wolstenholme, the benefits of integrating healthcare services along the patient pathway is a topic gaining importance. Furthermore, the availability of accurate healthcare big data opens up research opportunities that were previously unimaginable.
From a complementary perspective, the collaboration between ORAHS and EWG on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling PATAT is based on the common idea of promoting research in this challenging field. To this end, we would launch a competition among OR researchers – not only in healthcare – on a new OR problem representing a challenging (even if academic) integrated problem in healthcare.
The computational problem considered in the competition addresses the following three well-known operational problems simultaneously: patient admission scheduling (PAS), surgical case planning (SCP) and nurse-to-room assignment (NRA). This integrated problem requires determining patient admission dates, assigning surgical cases to operating theaters, assigning patients to rooms and assigning nurses to rooms. The scheduling period varies from one to four weeks. We consider the static deterministic version of this integrated problem in which all information is known at the time of solving.
The competition will be managed by Andrea Schaerf, Sara Ceschia, Roberto M. Rosati and Eugenia Zanazzo (Intelligent Optimization Lab, University of Udine), Pieter Smet and Greet Vanden Berghe (KU Leuven) who have considerable experience in managing similar activities. The Intelligent Optimization Lab has experience organizing optimization competitions, including the Second and the Third International Timetabling Competition , and the First and Second International Nurse Rostering Competitions .
