New INFORMS Healthcare Conference Highlights Increased Role of Math Modeling in Health Systems

First INFORMS Conference in Healthcare Operations, Decision-Making, Informatics

MONTREAL, May 4, 2011 – The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) will host its first conference on healthcare in Montreal this June. INFORMS Healthcare 2011 takes place at the Hilton Bonaventure Hotel in Montréal from June 20-22.

The topics will range from improving the scheduling of patients at clinics to shortening ambulance response times to using new algorithms for beaming radiation at cancer cells.

The conference is a new INFORMS thematic conference on the health sector that brings together researchers and stakeholders to elaborate on current challenges. It will include current research in healthcare operations research and analytics; presentations by leading researchers and practitioners; a cross-cultural view of healthcare systems and operational impacts; and a structured networking lunch.

Over 400 abstracts have been submitted on topics that include

• Capacity and patient flow management
• Data mining and health informatics
• Emergency medical services
• Healthcare delivery systems
• Healthcare operations management
• Healthcare supply chains
• Improving patient flow through capacity planning and scheduling
• Medical decision making
• Modeling and optimization
• Operations research for public health
• Pharmaceutical applications
• Pharmacoeconomics
• Transplant operations

Registration information is at http://meetings2.informs.org/healthcare2011/registration.html. Additional information about attending the conference is at http://meetings2.informs.org/healthcare2011/.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #healthcare11.

The Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) and nine additional organizations are technical cosponsors of the conference.

About INFORMS

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS^®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial engineering, and telecommunications. INFORMS serves the scientific and professional needs of operations research analysts, experts in analytics, consultants, scientists, students, educators, and managers, as well as their institutions, by publishing a variety of journals that describe the latest research in operations research. INFORMS Online (IOL) is at www.informs.org. Further information about operations research can be found at www.scienceofbetter.org.

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