Welcome to the Healthcare Operational Research (HCOR) special interest group website!

Canadian Healthcare Optimization Workshop (CHOW):

This workshop provides a forum for researchers with a common interest in healthcare optimization to share the latest advances with other researchers and practitioners in the field. The workshop also connects researchers with practitioners to discuss innovative solutions and best practices that help improve the effectiveness of the healthcare system. This year’s program includes presentations by researchers and practitioners, as well as roundtable discussions.

CHOW will be a in person event, held on Sunday, May 28th (the day before the start of the CORS/Optimization Days Conference in Montreal). The event will take place at HEC Montréal. The preliminary schedule is from 1pm to 8pm.

The workshop connects academics from disciplines such as operations management, operations research, and artificial intelligence/machine learning with healthcare practitioners to discuss innovative solutions, data-driven decision support tools, and best practices to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare systems. It also promotes the research of young scholars with a common interest in healthcare optimization.

For more information see here.

CORS Micro-Event (online):

Real-world challenges with data and analytics at Ontario Health presented by Jonathan Wang, Ontario Health on Friday, April 14th, 2023 from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. EST.

The slides of the presentation can be found here.

Jonathan Wang is the Director, Health System Analytics & Business Intelligence at Ontario Health, the provincial agency responsible for the planning and delivery of health care in Ontario. He’s responsible for ensuring data and insights get into the right hands at the right time to ensure up-to-date situational awareness of the health system and to drive better decision making. Jonathan is a champion of using analytics and operations research techniques to solve difficult problems in healthcare, having successfully used OR to solve resource allocation problems and secure new investments for infrastructure and health human resources in the Ontario cancer system. He holds a Master of Applied Science from the University of Toronto and worked with Professor Michael Carter to build a neural network to predict emergency department overcrowding at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. When not thinking about analytics and healthcare, he enjoys spending time with his family and finding new parks around Ontario for his two young girls.

In this 45-minute talk (followed by a 15-minute Q&A) Jonathan Wang, Director, Health System Analytics & Business Intelligence at Ontario Health, will discuss the current key challenges facing Ontario Health from a data and analytics (D&A) perspective. The talk will focus on three key D&A challenges and some of the work underway to tackle these challenges. These challenges can be articulated by the following three questions:

  • Can I trust my data? (Data/information governance)
  • What’s happening now and where are we going? (Trajectory monitoring and prediction)
  • What are the impacts of policy decisions ?