The healthcare sector is globally growing, in quantity and complexity. Hence, conventional planning becomes a much more challenging task. Novel advances ask for highly specialized optimization methods to improve the efficiency of current healthcare systems.

The 1st IBOSS-ECMath workshop "Optimization Methods in Healthcare" aims to connect people that work in this intersecting fields of operations research and process planning in healthcare. We will present computational optimization methods for different healthcare planning problems and discuss how we can make them routine applications in daily operations.

This workshop is funded by the Einstein Center for Mathematics Berlin and the MODAL AG.

Motivation and Aim of the Workshop

In contrast to industries like production and transport planning, mathematical optimization is not yet fully established in the healthcare sector. There are still many obstacles to overcome: the complexity of IT-systems, overconstrained requirements of each individual hospital, and, especially, human acceptance.
The intention of the workshop was to to bring together partners from science, practice, and industry that work in the fields of healthcare planning and better process management. It served as a platform for people that work in different areas around planning in healthcare. The different perspectives on the common problems led to a fruitful exchange on how current processes are ran, what potential difficulties are, and how mathematical optimization can improve current processes in order to provide a better treatment of the patients, a better working environment for employees, and a healthy economical situation of the hospital.

Further information can be found at http://www.zib.de/node/3805