General Program
For an online access to the program as well as streams open the following link: OnlineProgram
Session Overview
The schedule for the sessions, keynotes and social activities can be found here: Session Overview.pdf
Monday 17th of July 2023 09:30 am - Prof.dr.ir. Erwin Hans
Title: Integrated planning of health services – a little flexibility goes a long way
Abstract: The staffing crisis in healthcare can, at least partly, be solved by reducing the siloed mentality of healthcare providers. Integrated capacity planning between and within healthcare providers can reduce access time, increase productivity, while at the same time reducing experienced workload for healthcare staff. Our research shows great potential for this, and also gives a hopeful message: a little flexibility goes a long way… Realizing this potential requires an interdisciplinary approach to overcome the barriers for implementation.
Biography: Erwin W. Hans is a Full Professor Operations Management in Healthcare at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He co-founded the Center of Healthcare Operations Improvement & Research (CHOIR, https://www.utwente.nl/en/choir/), the Netherlands research center for OR/OM in healthcare. He works closely with many healthcare providers in the Netherlands, studying applications in e.g. hospitals, rehabilitation, and home care. He chairs the High-Tech Business & Entrepreneurship department at the University of Twente and is an OR/OM lecturer on all academic levels and for healthcare professionals.
Tuesday 18th of July 2023 09 am - A/Prof. Michael O’Sullivan
Title: The Future is Now - Digital Twins for Healthcare
Abstract: Digital twins are digital copies of (existing or proposed) physical systems that are used to both better understand and also support decision making about those systems. In healthcare the use of digital twins can range from physically accurate representations of organs to support diagnosis and treatment to logically accurate representations of an entire healthcare system to support policy design and development. This talk will present a vision of a futuristic healthcare system that utilises digital twins to deliver healthcare services effectively and efficiently. It will then give case studies from existing Operations Research work by the ORUA research group (orua.auckland.ac.nz) that already prototype the digital twin models needed for the future.
Biography: Dr Michael O’Sullivan completed his BSc (Honours) and MPhil (Distinction) at the University of Auckland before gaining an MS and PhD at Stanford University where he specialised in Operations Research (OR). Since returning to the Department of Engineering Science in Auckland his focus has been on applying OR and Analytics to difficult real-world decision making problems. Michael formed the Operations Research Union Analytics (ORUA) research group with Associate Professor Cameron Walker and they are now co-directors of ORUA which has research programmes that investigate decision making algorithms and tools in many application areas including Finance, Healthcare, and Infrastructure Planning. Michael’s research work includes collaborations with Stanford, Oxford University, and University of California (UC) Santa Cruz. Michael was invited to be one of four Theme Leaders for the Precision Driven Health research partnership, a large public-private research consortium that utilise approaches such as Machine Learning, Analytics, Optimisation, and Simulation to improve decision making, such as investment in resources, in Healthcare.
Panel Discussion - Thursday of 20th July 2023
Title: The role of integrated planning in mastering current and future challenges in managing healthcare – adding practitioner’s perspectives
The panel will discuss the current and future challenges seen by healthcare managers and assess the role that integrated planning along with modeling and quantitative methods plays in mastering these challenges. The panel consists of one minister responsible for health care, one health care manager, one health care planner, one investigative journalist and one academic host with operations research background, who will facilitate the discussion and the link to the audience.
Dr. Juliane Bogner-Strauß is State Minister for Health, Care, Sport and Society, Styria.
Previously she was Federal Minister for Women, Families and Youth in the Austrian government. Bogner-Strauß studied chemistry and habilitated in 2008 (venia docendi for Genomics and Molecular Biology, Graz University of Technology). Before she started her political career she has been Associate Professor and Deputy Head at the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics (2010) and the Institut of Biochemistry (2014), Graz University of Technology, Austria.
Prof. Gerhard Stark is the managing director of KAGes, the network of public hospitals in Styria, Austria’s second largest federal state. He is a MD for internal medicine, by training.
As a scientist he has been involved in numerous medical and health care research projects that have taken him to Germany and the U.S., among other places, for research stays. In addition, he held several top-management positions in healthcare organizations. He has also been involved in developing conceptional and simulation models predicting the future demand for healthcare specialists. For his scientific contributions to healthcare modeling he received an honorary doctorate from TU Graz (Graz University of Technology).
Prof. Herwig Ostermann is the Executive Director of Gesundheit Österreich GmbH (Austrian National Public Health Institute). Previously, he was head of the Department of Health Economics. He studied International Economics in Innsbruck and Dublin and subsequently completed his master's and doctoral studies in Health Sciences at the private University of Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology (UMIT) in Hall in Tyrol where he now holds a part-time professorship in Health Policy and Administration at the Department of Public Health and Health Technology Assessment.
Dieter Hubmann is an investigative journalist who specializes, among a few other topics, mainly on societal aspects of health care planning and delivery. He currently works for Kleine Zeitung, a local newspaper and is a renowned and respected expert of the political scene in Austria. Dieter Hubmann will also bring the customer’s / patient’s views, their needs, expectations and experiences to the discussion panel.
Prof. Siegfried Vössner is head of the department of Engineering and Business Informatics at TU Graz. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department for Engineering Economic Systems and Operations Research at Stanford University, USA and a project manager for McKinsey&Company and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research focus lies in Principles of Modeling and Simulation and their application to socio-technical systems. He has been called as a consultant to both governmental institutions (Public Health, Public safety) and industry in the area of Operations Planning / Management and Digital Transformation.