Welcome to the ORAHS International Seminar Series!
Our next seminar on OR applied to Health Services is scheduled for January 28th 2025.
The ORAHS International Seminar Series aims to provide state-of-the-art research talks for scholars worldwide who are active in the nexus of OR/OM and healthcare applications. We believe these seminars will prepare and support graduate students and researchers who are active in the field with the newest research conducted worldwide. Moreover, they provide opportunities for academic members to get acquainted and find possible future collaborations.
How to join?
The seminars are planned monthly, every last Tuesday of the month, via Zoom in the late afternoon (Europe), morning (US), or evening (Asia/Pacific).
Register now!
You can register here for the upcoming seminar on January 28th 2025.
Upcoming seminars
January 28th 2025, 16:00-17:00 CET - DR. Harwin de Vries (RSM, Rotterdam, Netherlands) - Enhancing Access to Family Planning Services: Challenges and Opportunities for OR
Title Enhancing Access to Family Planning Services: Challenges and Opportunities for OR
Abstract Improving access to family planning (FP) services is key to achieving many of the United Nations sustainable development goals and is frequently labelled a “development best buy”. Despite that, the need for family planning goes unmet for at least 218 women, and funding to address this is stagnating. As such, optimizing the use of available family planning resources is key. In this talk, we will discuss opportunities for OR to contribute to this pursuit. We will discuss the main challenges FP providers face, argue that OR is well-positioned to help address them, and illustrate this using several recent research projects on family planning outreach teams.
For those who would like to have a look at the papers we will cover:
- Paper 1: De Vries, H., Swinkels, L. E., & Van Wassenhove, L. N. (2021). Site visit frequency policies for mobile family planning services. Production and Operations Management, 30(12), 4522-4540.
- Paper 2: Alban, A., Blaettchen, P., de Vries, H., & Van Wassenhove, L. N. (2022). Resource allocation with sigmoidal demands: Mobile healthcare units and service adoption. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 24(6), 2944-2961.
- Paper 3: van Rijn, L., de Vries, H., & Van Wassenhove, L. N. (2024). Site Reassignment for Mobile Outreach Teams: Investigating the Effectiveness of Decentralized Decision Making. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 26(6), 2336-2350.
Bio Harwin de Vries is Associate Professor at the Technology and Operations Management department at RSM. His research focuses on health & humanitarian logistics, with a particular focus on disaster relief logistics and the logistics behind enhancing access to essential medicines and health services in LMICs. Harwin has collaborated closely with more than twenty humanitarian/ health organizations, studying how key decisions in health/ humanitarian supply chains affect patients or beneficiaries and how they could be improved. Harwin won several prizes with his research, including the 2021 ERIM Award for Outstanding Performance by a Young Researcher and attracted several research grants, including the 2022 NWO VENI grant. Harwin published academic papers in leading scientific journals, including Production and Operations Management and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Harwin also serves on the board of the POMS College of Humanitarian Operations & Crisis Management (HOCM). Before joining RSM, Harwin worked at INSEAD (France) as postdoctoral researcher and manager of the INSEAD Humanitarian Research Group. Harwin holds a PhD degree in Operations Research from the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Registration You can register here for the upcoming seminar on January 28th 2025.
February 25th 2025, 16:00-17:00 CET - Prof. Hari Balasubramanian (UMass Amherst, USA)
The details of this talk will follow soon.
March 25th 2025, 16:00-17:00 CET - Prof. Christina Büsing (RWTH Aachen, Germany) - Fair planning of out-of-hours service for pharmacies
Title Fair planning of out-of-hours service for pharmacies.
Abstract Pharmacies ensure a continuous supply of pharmaceuticals at any day and nighttime. 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.
We present a model for the planning developed in collaboration with the Chamber of Pharmacists North Rhine. Using aggregation and matheuristics, we compute almost optimal plans for the North Rhine area in short time. The computed plans assign fewer shifts in total compared to the real plan, but they exhibit an unfair concentration of shifts. We propose a strategy for integrating fairness into the planning based on a lexicographic fairness criterion. Using theoretical insights, we compute out-of-hours plans that are almost maximally fair in short time.
Bio 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 Rolf Möhring on the topic of “Recoverable Robust Combinatorial Optimization”. During her PostDoc-phase she started working on different problems related to health care optimization such as the placement of mobile medial units, the patient-to-room assignment problem, 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 she is the founder and head of the Center for Algorithmics and Optimization at the RWTH.
Seminar archive
Recordings of our previous seminar talks are available below.
- November 26th 2024: Prof. Erik Demeulemeester, KU Leuven, Belgium. How can the partitioning of elective surgeries benefit the inpatient operating theater? The recording of the talk can be found here.
- October 29th 2024: Prof. Peter Vanberkel, Dalhousie University, Canada. Using Machine Learning to Develop Guidelines for Identifying Patients Who May Leave an Emergency Department Without Being Seen. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- September 24th 2024: Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. The R.O.A.D. to precision medicine. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- June 25th 2024: Dr. Derya Demirtas, University of Twente, NL. Unlocking the Value of Extensive Data: Estimating spatial cardiac arrest risk to guide resource allocation decisions. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- May 28th 2024: Prof. Dionne Aleman, University of Toronto, Canada. Pandemic planning from A (agent-based simulation) to V (vaccine prioritization). The recording of the talk can be found here.
- April 30th 2024: Prof. Mónica Oliveira, University of Lisbon, Portugal. Advancing collaborative value modeling in health settings: From applications to novel tools. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- March 19th 2024: Dr. Ana María Anaya-Arenas, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. The Biomedical Sample Transportation Problem: routing commodities with very short lifespan.
- February 27th 2024: Prof. Christine Currie, University of Southampton, UK. A Generalisable Digital Twin Simulation Model of an Emergency Department. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- January 30th 2024: Prof. Vedat Verter, Queens University, Canada. Nurse Workload Balancing Using Real-Time Location Data. The recording of the talk can be requested via email.
- November 28th 2023: Dr. Melanie Reuter, University of Twente, NL. SPELL: Supporting emergency services with OR- and AI-based approaches.
- October 17th 2023: Prof. Nadia Lahrichi, Polytechnique Montreal, Canada. Integrating bed use and patient selection to the master surgical planning in the OR. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- September 26th 2023: Prof.Em. Warren Powell, Princeton University, USA. A Universal Framework for Sequential Decision Problems in Health Applications. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- June 27th 2023: Dr. Ana Viana, Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal. Kidney Exchange Programmes: a guided tour from 2004 to 2023. The recording of the talk can be found here, and the corresponding slides here.
- May 30th 2023: Prof. Brian Denton, University of Michigan, MI, USA. Predictive and Prescriptive Models for Early Detection of Prostate Cancer. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- April 25th 2023: Dr. Gréanne Leeftink, University of Twente, NL. Capacity sharing in neonatal care networks. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- March 28th 2023: Prof. Lerzan Örmeci, Koç University, Turkey. Appointment Scheduling with Patient Preferences. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- February 28th 2023: Prof. Jens Brunner, University of Augsburg, Germany. Resident scheduling in teaching hospitals with the use of quantitative methods. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- January 31st 2023: Prof. Retsef Levi, MIT, USA. Analytics Driven Innovation in Health Systems. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- December 6th 2022: Prof. Richard Boucherie, University of Twente, NL. Dynamic assignment of capacity and fair balancing of COVID-19 patients over hospitals. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- November 11th 2022: Prof. Margaret Brandeau, Stanford University, USA. Replacing Complex Models for Health Decision Making with Metamodels: Three Examples. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- October 4th 2022 (joint seminar with WORMS): Prof. Sonya Crowe and Dr. Zella King, University College London, UK. Using OR to make real-time aggregated predictions of hospital admission for emergency patients. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- June 28th 2022: Prof. Paul Harper and Michalis Panayides, Cardiff University, UK. Modelling Healthcare Behaviours: A Game Theoretic Model Between Emergency Departments and Emergency Medical Services Queueing Systems. The recording of the talk can be found here.
- May 31st 2022: Prof. Stefan Nickel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Health Care Logistics in EMS: A real world case combining Analytics, Simulation and Optimization. The recording of the talk can be found here.
Organizing committee
The ORAHS international seminar series is organized by Amin Asadi, Aleida Braaksma, Derya Demirtas, Daniela Guericke, Gréanne Leeftink, Janusz Meylahn, Sebastian Rachuba, and Anne Zander of the CHOIR research center of the University of Twente (The Netherlands). For questions and inquiries feel free to reach out to us via email.
The ORAHS international seminar series is supported by its advisory board, consisting of Richard Boucherie (University of Twente, The Netherlands), and Erwin Hans (University of Twente, the Netherlands), and the ORAHS board.