Decision making under uncertainty in healthcare, Symposium and PhD thesis defence by Hayo Bos

Friday the 13^th of June, 2025 

Prior to the PhD defence of Hayo Bos on the 13^th of June, 2025 of the thesis “Decision making under uncertainty in healthcare” there will be a short symposium with both national and international speakers. Talks will be given by prof. Misja Mikkers (University of Twente), Kars Tolsma and Dr. Suresh Nagesser (Diakonessenhuis), prof. Amy Cohn (University of Michigan), and prof. Christina Büsing (RWTH Aachen). 

The symposium will include a lunch break of 30 minutes, and the promotion ceremony will be followed by a reception from 16:00 - 17:00, open to registered attendees of the event.

Program:

Abstracts

Variablity in healthcafe, an opportunity or a threat - Kars Tolsma and Dr. Suresh Nagesser

Kars Tolsma is executive manager acute care which consists of the departments: OR, emergency, intensive care, capacity management, policy support, registration and preoperative screening (450 employees). In addition to his work for his departments he is highly involved with integral capacity management, BI, strategy development and patient safety. He was co-founder of an association of hospitals aimed at improving patient safety. 

Dr. Suresh Nagesser is a general and vascular surgeon. In the past he has been on the medical board of the Diakonessenhuis for 6 years, responsible for Quality and Safety in patient care. He currently is inpector for Qualicor Europe, an institute for Quality and Safety in patient care, that regularly visits hospitals in the Netherlands en Belgium.

Using Simulation to Explain Uncertainty: A Novel Form of Medical Education - prof. Amy Cohn

Clinicians understand and appreciate the uncertainty in how a patient’s disease will progress, or the variability in how they will respond to different treatments. On the other hand, they often struggle to fully grasp the impact that variability and uncertainty have on clinical operations, resulting in decision making that does not lead to the expected or desired outcome. Discrete event simulation can provide a novel, easy-to-grasp, and sometimes even entertaining way for clinicians to develop greater intuition about how stochasticity impacts their day-to-day operations.

Professor Amy Ellen Mainville Cohn is an Alfred F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she also holds an appointment in the Department of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health. Dr. Cohn is the Chief Transformation Officer at Michigan Medicine and the Director of the University of Michigan Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety (CHEPS). 

Fair planning of out-of-hours service for pharmacies - prof. Christina Büsing

Pharmacies ensure a continuous supply of pharmaceuticals at any day and night time. An out-of-hours plan assigns 24-hour shifts to a subset of pharmacies on each day such that an appropriate supply is guaranteed while the burden on pharmacists is minimized and the shifts are fair allocated. We present our results for the chamber of pharmacies in North Rhine.  

Christina Büsing is a professor for combinatorial optimization at the RWTH Aachen University. She studied mathematics in Münster, Madrid and Berlin and finished in 2010 her PhD under the supervision of Rofl Möhring on the topic of “Recoverable Robust Combinatorial Optimization”. During her PostDoc-phase she started working on different problem related to health care optimization such as the placement of mobile medial units, the patient-to-room assignment and the appointment scheduling for GPs. By now she supervises seven PhD students, she leads the student lab CAMMP (computational and mathematical modelling program) in Aachen and is the founder and head of the Center for Algorithmics and Optimization at the RWTH.